Hey I've been working on reading music for a little while but I'm still at a pretty much beginner level. Having not touched real staff music after four years of playing, I have technique much better than my reading skills. I was wandering if anyone could suggest some good sheet music (preferrably that I could get free, I have no money) that could help me learn to read music better while still being solid music that I can pick up good theory concepts etc. from.
Classical sheet music can be found free. Most every thing else you must purchase.
Click here for a classical sheet music site And then turn Google loose.
IMHO What works best for learning how to play standard notation on your guitar is to come up with some single note lead sheet music. Our church has a "second" hymnal that only uses a single note "lead sheet music" format. Ask about this at your church perhaps they will have this same hymnal.
Then look around your public library. Many music books will have the same song in several formats. Hunt through your library for some that have the single note format.
I purchased a paper back book of 100 Beatles tunes in lead sheet / fake chord format for under $10 (US). You just have to look around.
Good luck.
Last edited by Malcolm; 10-25-2007 at 12:33 AM.
Check this too:
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
Hi Mike …. don’t you have any “songbooks”, ie books showing the guitar music for your favourite players?
I mean, you need at least a few songbooks of your favourite stuff and all those songbooks have both TAB and full notation (& many include a tutorial DVD showing you how to play each section) … you can practice reading the notation from that (it’s a good way to do it, because if you already know the songs then you know what each section of notation is really supposed to sound like).
If you don’t have any money then you can pick up loads of those songbooks cheap on eBay (the Hal Leonard Signature Licks series is good).
Ian.
Songbooks always have sounded like a good idea - but I have one issue: Today almost all of those are books are written just as you described them, with both music AND tab. When I'm trying to learn to read, I've discovered from some free music I've gotten this way, the tab really gets in the way. Sooner or later I glimpse the tab to the piece I'm trying to read and I don't really have to read it at all anymore. The only way to get rid of this problem is some intricate method of covering only the tab parts, which is just irritating.
Yeah I had the same problem, though if you don't plan on using the tab you don't need an intricate method at all. I put dark tape over it or just scribble it out. I guess if you wanted to use the tab at some point you would probably not want to do this, but as far as I'm concerned tab is pretty much useless so I have no problem rendering it permanently unusable.Originally Posted by MikeHoyle
"I second-hand smoke two packs of cigarettes a day." -- Jerry Seinfeld
Try getting some a song book for an instrument other than guitar i.e. piano that you like. There's no tab and it force you to read the music.
Playing piano music on guitar gets you used to polyphonic music and gives you a new perspective. However, guitar has a slightly smaller range than piano (Up to around the bottom line of a base clef) so you might have to alter things a bit. You could always get some sheet music fior something like violin.
There are a few free classical/ traditional scores on the web where the composer has been dead for years, but if you want anything else, there's always music shops.
No one sings the blues quite like Yngwie!
Well I like TAB (even though I can read notation), but maybe an option would be to just loosely tape strips of plain paper over the TAB lines, and then photocopy the songbook … that gives you a photocopy with just the notation, & it leaves your songbook undamaged (peel off the paper masks).
Ian.
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