Topic: Online Sheet Music

[metime00]

I don't actually need sheet music, but I've noticed that there's guitar tabs for literally every song on the face of the planet, but there's never sheet music, even when the songs were originally played using a different instrument. Why is it that there's no communities for writing sheet music?

And for someone who wants to play more obscure pieces like video game music, how could they get sheet music to play such songs without the internet?

[EhJayArr]

I don't actually need sheet music, but I've noticed that there's guitar tabs for literally every song on the face of the planet, but there's never sheet music, even when the songs were originally played using a different instrument. Why is it that there's no communities for writing sheet music?

And for someone who wants to play more obscure pieces like video game music, how could they get sheet music to play such songs without the internet?

...by obtaining the proper IP usage rights from the copyright holders. 

[metime00]

That's what I was worried about, you have to go to the company/publisher and ask for the sheets?

[EhJayArr]

That's what I was worried about, you have to go to the company/publisher and ask for the sheets?

I meant that for them to be available online, somebody would have to obtain the obtain the IP rights to sell the sheet music. It's unreasonably difficult to do this, in most cases.

On the other hand, many beginner and intermediate instrumental books are collections of popular showtunes, tv, and movie themes... there could be loopholes about publishing sheet music, depending on the length of the excerpted music, instrumentation, or a certain amount of modification from the original notes.

Your best bet is probably to pay some upper-level jazz or composition major at your local university a few bucks to transcribe stuff for your personal usage. Musicians will do anything for money!

(click to show/hide)

...anything. 

[AxeGrrl]

I don't actually need sheet music, but I've noticed that there's guitar tabs for literally every song on the face of the planet, but there's never sheet music

Are you aware of places like ultimate-guitar.com and http://www.powertabs.net/ ? 

Half the stuff at ultimate (and ALL of the stuff at powertabs) ARE in sheet music format!

If you download the programs Guitar Pro and Powertab (the latter is free), you'll immediately have access to THOUSANDS of 'sheet music' files

It's verrrrrrry sweet, especially considering that it's all available for free.  The powertabs website was closed down for quite awhile, for legal reasons, but they've apparently worked all that out