Putting a Tablet PC System together for Musicians, Part 8: Free Digital Sheet Music

While online vendors offer an incredible breadth of digital sheet music offerings at prices that are much more reasonable than their paper counterparts, nothing really beats "free". Here are a number of sites that provide a surprising depth of free digital sheet music libraries:


I think i found the motherlode of free sheet music! Free-Scores.com is an amazing repository of hundreds of websites that offer free music in a dizzying array of formats ( GIF - PDF - EPS/ PS - TEF - ABC - TABRITE - SIBILIUS - CAPELLA - ENC - MUSICTEX - NOTEWORTHY - MUS / ETF - TAB / TXT - GUITAR PRO - SCORCH) as well as their own collection of free PDF scores. An amazing range of instrument repertoire (bagpipes? zithers? bouzouki?) is represented. The website offers its own source of PDF music scores, along with a disclaimer:

We are proud to participate to the transmission of free sheet music.
Our project is to distribute for free the most important choice of domain public free scores.
We feature 2337 piece of music to download in PDF format.

Their license page is all in French, and my French sucks - but it appears to talk about the differences between various forms of copyright (public domain, creative commons, standard copyrights, etc.) Tons of original music from what i can see being offered at many of the linked websites - the interface is nice and clean, easy to navigate - you can even search for websites that offer repertoire in your preferred format (like PDF or Sibelius).
If the search engine can't find a free version of your requested work, it will automatically pop up links and ads from commecial vendors that can sell you what they have in stock. Very nice service. I'll be spending plenty of time at this portal site exploring the vast network of contributing sites.

8Notes.com is another terrific multi-purpose site. They offer a small library of free public domain sheet music of the most popular works in Sibelius, MIDI and PDF formats for a wide variety of instruments and styles. They also have an indexed database linking an ecclectic collection of free sheet music found on outside websites. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of 8Notes.com is their extensive collection of dynamic music and theory lessons. This is one of the cleanest and best designed free-music websites by far - the sheet music offerings are perfect for the beginning and intermediate students, and the online lesson material alone would make a perfect compliment to any serious pedagogy studio.

SheetMusicArchive.net makes a reasonable set of pdf scans of public domain editions of public domain classical music available for free, or a full cd for $19.95. Again, the quality of the scans varies. Note that you are limited to 2 free downloads a day at this site.


ClassicalArchives.com is amazing - at the time of this writing, they have 37,213 full length classical music files by 2,002 composers. 5 free downloads a day for non-members, 1000 downloads a month for those who pay a $25 yearly membership fee. This is a massive collection of classical repertoire transcribed into MIDI formats and also avaialble as MP3's - basically what this means is that this is the computer equivalent of an electronic listening library. I'm listening to the Scherzo from Brahms' Sonata in F minor for Two pianos as i'm writing this, and the tempi are a pretty bizarre - the MIDI seems to have been keyed in note by note, rather than being a "live" performance, so the notes are perfectly clean, but the tempi are all rigidly mechanical. You won't find "artistic" interpretations of the classics here, but that's not what this resource is for - it's a great way to get an overview of a ton of repertoire quickly and affordably. Note, while you could technically open the MIDI files as "sheet music" from within a music notation program like Sibelius or Finale, it would only be a bare view of the notes, missing all of the performance instructions, dynamics and title/movement heading texts.

The above list is by no means exhaustive, but i think they represent some of the larger and better known sites currently available. If you know of any others, please email me and i'll update this list accordingly.

tags: free, sheet, music, 8notes, classical, archives, digital, scores, tablet, pc, download



tags: free, sheet, music, 8notes, classical, archives, digital, scores, tablet, pc, download

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