Finding Free Sheet Music to Print At Home

There most popular internet keyword search, even more popular than “sheet music” is “printable sheet music,” believe it or not. Yes, even more popular than “learn piano” or “piano school”. Have we ever become convenient, expecting music to be printed from our home printers, while still dressed in pajamas. Tsk! Tsk! Heck, even the cost of printers has come down substantially, why not even invest in a nice laser printer, and create quality sheet music as good as your favorite publisher?

The easiest free sheet music to print and find is classical. Although jazz, Christian, Christmas and Jewish and traditional piano music is catching up! In most cases, the free sheet music that you find on the Internet is public domain music that has an expired copyright. All original classical music works by pre-20th century composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, etc. are most likely in the public domain now, according to the United States Copyright Law.

When you find free sheet music to print on the Internet by these or other classical composers you are going to be downloading either a scanned image of an original piece of sheet music or a digitally recreated copy of the original music created in a music editor such as Finale or Sibelius. A public domain composition is no longer under copyright protection and can be used or even modified at will providing you reference it.

You can Now Create Free Sheet Music to Print

Thanks to the internet, people learning piano now gain access to the best and most variety of sheet music ever thought possible. Old fashioned methods of getting music books have now been replaced by the internet’s huge collection of PDF files, image files and other easily accessible formats. It’s so much fun to download your music and to start playing it right away – saving loads of valuable time which could be used for your piano practice.

In my humble opinion, another convenient (and clever) way of acquiring free sheet music you can print, is to create it yourself! Just pop in one of the easily accessible midi files of your favorite songs into a notation software, and it will churn out sheet music, kind of like cocoa is mixed with butter to make chocolate. You can also sweeten these piano notation software with custom settings.

Is it Legal?

Many people get a kick out of sheer amount of mp3s and free sheet piano music available on the internet. The biggest problem is finding the music that you want, for the instrument that you play, AND have it be legal. You certainly won’t find the latest copyrighted pop sheet music on any legal site, although even some established sites will offer the occasional pop sheet music file for free.

The good news is that when a composition enters public domain and goes out of copyright, anyone can download it or even modify it.

Remember, I’m not a lawyer but a musician! So please don’t interpret any material from this site as legal advice.

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