Where to find sheet music?

Everything else
1

I’m looking for the equivelant of the iTunes store for sheet music, help!

I’ve been learning the Ukulele (props to the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra for inspiring me) and I’m trying to find a selection of classic rock and pop tunes that I can learn.

I can find guitar tabs, buy the strings don’t match up (obviously) and the few uke tabs I’ve found tend to be only the chords or pretty mix and match.

Any tips on finding sheet music? I can of course by complete books, but I’d prefer to mix and match a few pieces of only the music I want. It’s much cheaper, I would hope.

2

It’s not cheap. You can print out piano/voice/guitar arrangements for about $4.50 a song. Whereas you can probably buy entire fake books for $15 or so.

If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can print it to a PDF file so that you can store it for later use. You have to go deep into the advanced options in your Acrobat Distiller printer driver, though, and set the Postscript Options: TrueType Font Download OptionTruetype fonts to Bitmap to get the notation to appear properly in the PDF.

You can download the first page for free though, to see if it’s what you want before you buy.

3

I’d try calling local music stores. Places that sell pianos might be a good start. If they don’t sell sheet music themselves (and they probably don’t), they should at least know who does. I can’t see them having much of a business selling the hardware if they don’t even know where you can buy the software.

4

^-- my first suggestion

Or just Google “sheet music?”

There was once a time where the bulk of the money made from songwriting came from sales of sheet music.

5

Of course, compared to Roger Wong’s suggestion, mine looks so 1995.

6

I’ve bought pretty much all of my sheet music locally. If you find a place that sells it, they will usually let you special order specific songs and they will know a number of distributors to order from.

7

There’s also J.W.Pepper’s E-Print page, but I don’t think it’s as comprehensive as musicnotes.com.

For print music, I usually use Pepper or Sheet Music Plus in a pinch.

8

Books are going to be way cheaper. A 2-page piece of music can easily run $4-5 or much more, whereas one of the fake books might run $25.

9

www.sheetmusicdirect.com is similar to the above, comes with tabs and midi too. I had a look at the Sibelius plugin, Albert King sure does sound weird in midi. Incredibly expensive for some, 5 USD for parts of Bach pieces I looked at, but 3.95 for more conventional songs.

Found this too, a sort of youtube for ukulele players., apart from Jake Shimabukuro and the Sweet Child O Mine guy with the electric uke it’s um… not very inspiring… and thats me only being polite to fellow musicians as I play the guitar, there’s some really bad music on there.