hopeful of techy advice re free sheet music sites

December 26, 2007 at 02:02 AM · Hi,

I use Finale quite a bit but mostly for short simple pieces. I have no experience with Sibelius.

You should check out the Finale website, I think it is finalemusic.com. They offer a variety of products for varying prices. Notepad is free. The programs have all gotten much easier to learn and use over the years. They can also be quite powerful.

NOTE: I have no interest in the company or software or anything other than that I use Finale and find it quite good for my purposes.

December 26, 2007 at 02:52 AM · here are some sites for downloading free sheetmusic, pdf files mostly:

http://www.bh2000.net/score/

http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/scores/

http://www.ccarh.org/publications/scores/vivaldi/op8/

http://www.ccarh.org/publications/scores/vivaldi/op3/

http://muslib.mmv.ru/index_eng.html

http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/

http://icking-music-archive.org/scores/

http://notes.tarakanov.net/violin.htm

http://nlib.narod.ru/parts/violino1.html

http://www.free-scores.com/index_uk.php3

If you want violin concertos, sonatas, chamber music, standard etude material pay the reasonable cost for cds of these from cdsheetmusic.com

December 29, 2007 at 06:30 PM · www.sibeliusmusic.com has over 70,000 pieces of music; HOWEVER, almost anyone with the Sibelius software can publish almost anything there. SibeliusMusic is not a music publisher, per se, but rather a site where users of the Sibelius music notation software can self-publish their own work. It contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some posters there are students who barely know what a clef or key signature is, and there are also well-experienced professional musicians and composers, and the whole range between the two.

There are scores and parts for sale there, and there are free scores and parts. The problem is to navigate the site to find what you want.

You can start by using the search engine at the site. and then arrange it by price (starting with the free scores). You will find some very fine pieces there mixed in with a lot of amateur scratchings. If you don't mind wading through a lot of stuff you wouldn't ever want to use, you may still end up with some real gems there. Again, some are for sale, and some are free. It's all up to the poster to decide if he wants to give his stuff away or not.

Be aware that from the printed score, you cannot get the separate individual parts, if they are not also uploaded to the site. If the score is free, the parts (if uploaded) are also free. If the score has a charge, then the parts (if uploaded) also have a charge (starting at $1.00 per part, up to as much as $3.00 per part in $.25 increments).

The Sibelius software allows you to extract parts from scores prepared with the Sibelius software PROVIDED you have the original .sib file. When you are at the site, you are looking at the file using a Sibelius "Scorch" plug-in to READ the .sib file; you are NOT seeing or downloading the .sib file itself. (This is to protect the intellectual property of the original posters.) You would need to have the Sibelius program installed on your computer, and the composer/arranger would need to send you (email a file attachment or snail mail a CD-ROM) the .sib file in order to extract parts yourself from a score that does not already have extracted parts uploaded to the site. And then, the version of Sibelius you have would need to be the same or a LATER version of the program used to create the file. (An older version of the program, generally can NOT open a file created with a newer version of the program.)

You can find some real gems posted for free there, such as

"2. Scherzo energico" from two pieces for Violin and Piano (2003) by Andrey Rubtsov

http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/cgi-bin/show_score.pl?scoreid=59650

When you want to look for string trio, or string quartet, or chamber orchestra, or piano trio, etc. just select that in the search engine at the site. Then set some parameters when the first results come in to narrow down the search.