Let’s face it… finding musical piano sheets can be a drag. We are fortunate to live in an age where we have access to virtually millions of sources of information, right at our fingertips. Ahh yes, the Internet. All you have to do is go to your favorite search engine, type in the title and composer of your piece, press “Search,” and voila! Results in less than a second.
Now, finding some specific pieces can be harder than others. And unfortunately, it’s not always going to be free either. Before the Internet, people had to actually go to a music store and BUY all their sheet music! Today, we don’t even have to leave our home to get free sheets, and we can print them in just minutes to our home printers. How convenient!
Before the Internet, it was difficult to find free resources. You basically had to know someone who already had those pieces, so you could borrow or photocopy those sheets. Today, there are many options to find sheet music… absolutely free of charge.
Take Advantage of Search Engines
This is the most basic way to find free pieces. Just go to your favorite search engine, type in the title and composer of your selected piece, press search, and see what comes up. You can even search for more arbitrary keywords like, “free piano sheet music,” “free piano sheets,” or “free sheet music.” When you use an Internet resource such as Google, you will basically receive search results with a mixture of purchase options or free options that you can choose from in your search results.
Search Blogs
Over the years that I have personally searched for free pieces, I have found blogs to be one of the best resources ever. There are a lot of regular people just like you and me, who create music blogs on Blogspot or WordPress or whatever free blog software, and they will either compose their own arrangements or upload pieces to their blog, absolutely free for download to share with the world.
Public Domain Resources
If you are searching for sheet music that has been composed very long ago by composers who have long been dead (like Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, etc.), you can most likely access this sheet music completely for free because the copyright licenses on these works have expired. In general, as soon as something is written, drawn, painted, composed, and so on, it is automatically copyrighted by the creator. However, anything that has been composed before 1922 is in the public domain. That’s why it’s much easier to find very old, classical sheets on the Internet than it is to find more modern, popular sheet music. Popular sheet music is copyright protected, and therefore MUCH harder to find on the Internet without directly purchasing it.
Search Popular Piano Websites
Some of the most popular piano resource websites include 8notes.com, PianoWorld,com, and GMajorMusicTheory.org. These are great websites for searching for all kinds of free piano sheet music.
I Still Can’t Find It!
Now, if you’ve tried all of the above and STILL can’t find your favorite piano piece… it may be virtually impossible to find it for free on the Internet. I experience this all the time, most likely because I am looking for a very advanced, popular, or relatively new piano piece.
Sheet Music Plus
Sheet Music Plus has the world’s largest selection of instrumental sheets. Sometimes, if you cannot find your music for free, it’s worth paying for it. This website offers individual songs for prices as low as less than $5.00. This is definitely a small investment for receiving authentic piano sheets. You can download it right away to your home computer and print it out straight away. You can also buy full piano books by different musicians/composers, books focused on technical work, or books catered to different genres.
Virtual Sheet Music
Virtual Sheet Music is another option if you are willing to pay for. Basically, you pay a flat fee of $37.75 per year and you are granted access to unlimited free music sheets (for several different instruments, not just including piano). If you downloaded five or six pieces, it would be worth the fee. But with their membership fee, you can download hundreds of pieces, as often and as much as you desire! One of the best things about this website is that they are dedicated to providing very high quality music sheets. The scores won’t be visibly photocopied, they won’t have splotches everywhere, and they won’t be too small to read. You are guaranteed to receive the highest quality of sheet musical notation when you sign up for their membership.
Believe me, I have spent YEARS searching for piano music, and I know that these resources are well worthwhile. If you are interested in receiving free sheet music, visit my website to sign up to receive over 250 pieces of free piano sheets!