There’s nothing more vital for playing piano than having scores (well, except for very few pro players – congrats to those lucky people!).
Anyway, on the Web there are lots of options, and this can be quite confusing: in this article we’ll look at the best score sites for piano players!
1. MUSESCORE
Musescore offers over 1 million completely for free, and they also add lots of new tracks regularly, so their catalogue is almost always up to date and with new music as well.
In particular, this is a music notation suite which has the ability to connect musicians from around the world, letting them share their works and scores and also giving them access to tools that they can use for both making and editing a piano score.
This site’s browse function isn’t very intuitive so be prepared to look at musicians by artist or instrument, or search for a specific word, phrase, or combination of keywords. That said, Musescore offers a lot of adaptations that you won’t find anywhere else – and it’s completely free. If you’re looking for original compositions or adaptations of difficult-to-find pieces, Musescore should be your go-to resource.
You can enjoy a wide variety of benefits with Musescore, without having to pay a monthly fee. The paid Membership option though comes with more tools, playback opportunities and space to save compositions.
2. IMSLP
IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) is a huge collection of public domain sheet music that started in 2006, which is freely available to download and use: here you can find a (very) large collection of musical pieces and tunes, going from classical to jazz and other genres.
Their library is actually one of the largest online, with over 400000 scores, but as you will see the quality of the uploaded scores can vary greatly, as you can find very different formats going from practical PDFs to questionable scanned documents and also sometimes handwritten scores.
Anyone who uses sheet music will know about IMSLP. Back in 2006, the site was started and now offers the largest collection of free printable sheet music anywhere on the web.
The library’s extensive collection of books, scores, recordings, composers and performers is enough to keep you occupied for a lifetime. The search function is straightforward too; there are filters that allow you to choose between different historical periods.
3. MUTOPIA PROJECT
MUTOPIA PROJECT‘s organization has more than 2000 free soundtracks for you to use, and they all have a creative commons license (that means there is no legal risk if you want to modify, print, copy, distribute or perform these pieces of music).
The main focus of this website is classical music, but there’s also more new music from other genres as well now that are being constantly added to the site index and that are nicely arranged.
A good upside of this website is that you can download the sheets in PDF but you can also download in MIDI format.
All downloads are carefully typeset by a team of piano players volunteers (as this is a community and volunteer only driven website) that uploads and edits using Lilypond, and another feauture of the Mutopia website is that you can also see which projects are currently being edited by clicking the ‘In Progress’ tab at the top of your screen on the web pages of Mutopia.
4. PIANOTTE
PIANOTTE is a website for those who want to play rock and pop piano songs.
If you are into pop music or any styles of rock, Pianotte has a a great and comprehensive list of piano sheets that you can easily use, and you can also easily find them as they are nicely organised and divided for genre, time period and song’s artist, that are always growing thanks to the constant uploads and the fairly good amount of recent songs as well.
The “downside” of Pianotte is it focuses exclusively on sheet music for pianists (as the name clearly states), but if you’re a piano/keyboard player you have the big upside of the significant amount of modern pieces: If you’re searching for a piece of Camila Cabello or any other “modern” artist such as Billie Eilish, Harry Styles or Maneskin, and not so much interested in Chopin’s piano stuff, it should be one of your first choices.
Though the website might not look as appealing as others, it’s easy to ignore that when you literally see hundres of pages that you can easily download in a PDF format in a very straightforward way.
8Notes is a website started by the British composer David Bruce, a globally famous composer, that is the writer of this website and composes most of what he shares on it, together with a staff of freelancer composers.
Just like Musescore, some features on the site require you to pay for an annual subscription of $20, for example for downloading a high-quality PDF of the score and an unlimited download option for all the pieces on the site.
However, you can still download the sheet music for free by clicking the “Print” button and saving it as a PDF (even if usually with a lower quality), but with this method, you’ll need to submit pages one-by-one and download them in clips.
8notes has a lot of content across its different sections: Instruments, Artsts and Styles, and you can also listen to the tracks with mp3 quality and also with MIDI; another great feature (of the paid option, though) is the perk of requesting a new score for a particular song (in the website they say that requests are fullfilled most of the times withing 48 hrs, except for specific cases and difficult arrangements, but this is usually a small part of the cases and specific to a fairly small part of songs and piano pieces).
Also, you can find way more than just scores, and you can find also:
- Guitar, piano and Ukulele chord charts;
- A guitar tuner tool;
- Some converter tools (from MIDI files to sheet music, from Tabs to Sheet Music, from Tabs to MIDI files);
- A metronome;
- Music theory lessons;
- Tests for checking the lesson’s concepts
- Drum fills riff generator
6. NOVISCORE
Noviscore is a database that has all the sheet music you need including piano sheets: they offer files for several levels of playing ability with reading aids to help you learn and practice efficiently, and there are several styles and a search function that is usually useful and user friendly.
They have a large selection of different styles, just as other sites offer. Current popular favorites like Despacito or What About Us by Pink, to classical like Mendelssohn’s and Beethoven’s work, as well as a selection of Noviscore exclusive songs.Sheet music is downloadable as well as usable in their free app.
You can pay by PayPal, credit card or bank transfer.
