Free Sheet Music FAQ 1. What a bum web site! All I see is a title page -- and I wanted to find free sheet music! You should be shot -- and you suck pond scum! 2. What a bum web site! There's no free sheet music here -- you should be shot -- and you suck pond scum! 3. I'm looking for "Crossroads" by Cream -- where can I find it? 4. I love George Strait and I need some of his sheet music -- where can I find it? 5. Please send me the sheet music for 'Happy Birthday' 6. Give me the sheet music for La Bamba, 1812 Overture, and Yellow Submarine. Send it to me by tonight 7. I want the sheet music for all the Grammy winners. Give it to me 8. GIF? ABC? PDF? MIDI? What does all this mean? 9. Why do you have some MIDI sites listed? I wanted sheet music! 1. What a bum web site! All I see is a title page -- and I wanted to find free sheet music! You should be shot -- and you suck pond scum! It's true that "Free Sheet Music" does begin with a title page -- however, if you want to locate free sheet music sites, you MUST select something from the main menu! For instance, the free sheet music sites are kept on several pages that you can access by using the 'Free Sheet Music List: A,B,C,D, or E' menu picks. Use your cursor and click either the 'A', the 'B', the 'C', the 'D', or the 'E'. This will bring you to the sheet music site pages. Or, you can select the 'New Sheet Music' pick to see the latest sheet music discoveries. Finally, you can use our "Keyword Search" facility to locate sites if you are looking for something particular. Also, you can try our downloads and O'Neill's pages to find the thousands of completely free sheet music downloads we offer -- some with matching midi files and mandolin transcriptions! 2. What a bum web site! There's no free sheet music here -- you should be shot -- and you suck pond scum! Well, that's not completely true -- there are thousands of free sheet music here (try the downloads at http://www.freesheetmusic.net/sheet_music_downloads.html or any of the O'Neill's pages shown on the main menu). In addition to these, you will find also find links to hundreds and hundreds of free sheet music sites that I've located and that people have shared. The last time I counted (which was several months back), there were well over 100,000 pieces of free sheet music available from these sites -- I'm sure the number is much higher now. Give 'em a look and I'm sure you'll find something you like! 3. I'm looking for "Crossroads" by Cream -- where can I find it? For the most part, the list does not contain individual song titles, so you will have to do a little digging. However, if you are looking for the chord chart and lyrics to a rock tune, then you can probably find it at http://www.olga.net. There's a long, sad, and unresolved story about Olga, expensive lawyers, and big guy vs. little guy, but once upon a time Olga was a site where individuals contributed their own interpretations of popular rock tunes -- generally for guitar players. Over many years, practically every tune by any group you can think of has been sent to Olga. However, because of the afore-mentioned sad story, Olga no longer lists most of these songs. But ... that doesn't mean that mirror sites and overseas sites don't list the entire library! Visit http://www.olga.net and use their "archive search" facility to find the tune you're looking for. It will point you to an "archive" site where you can likely still find the chords and lyrics for the tune. 4. I love George Strait and I need some of his sheet music -- where can I find it? See Number three above. Olga will likely find what you need. Still, it will most likely point you to Cowpie -- which is kind of like an Olga for country music. 5. Please send me the sheet music for 'Happy Birthday' Thank you for asking, but I probably don't have it. I don't keep a library of all the available sheet music tunes -- I keep a library of sites where you can find free sheet music. You're best off searching the lists for likely sites for the tunes you're looking for. The Keyword Search should help. Still, it was nice of you to ask. Generally, if I do happen to have a GIF of the tune, I'll send it along (doesn't happen all that often, though). 6. Give me the sheet music for La Bamba, 1812 Overture, and Yellow Submarine. Send it to me by tonight Did your mother raise you in a barn?!?! You might try asking "please". Also, see the answer to the previous question about specific tunes. 7. I want the sheet music for all the Grammy winners. Give it to me. What a good idea! Why don't you transcribe them all and put them on a web site? Let me know the URL and I'll list it. 8. GIF? ABC? PDF? MIDI? What does all this mean? Many times, web authors store standard notation sheet music in graphics images. When you click on the tune, you'll see an image that looks pretty much like a sheet of regular sheet music. GIF and JPG refer to the two most common graphics formats. For the most part, when you see GIF or JPG, that means you can click on a tune or icon and see the notation displayed. You need no other software than your web browser to display the tune. PDF is similar -- it's standard notation stored in a graphics format -- except that you need a program on your end to display the file. The program is Adobe's Acrobat Reader -- you may already have a copy (many software titles include it), but you can download a copy off the Internet if you need one. MIDI is completely different from GIF, JPG, and PDF -- a MIDI file is NOT a graphics file of standard notation. Instead, it's a set of instructions that will play the tune on a MIDI player (which your machine most probably has installed). The nice thing about sites that have both JPG's and MIDI's, is that you can look at the JPG and listen to the MIDI to see how the tune sounds! Furthermore, there are several programs around that will accept a MIDI file and create standard music notation output! The last acronym you may come across is ABC. ABC is a standard for representing musical notation in small text files. For instance, a 50K GIF image of a tune might be expressed in a few hundred bytes of ABC notation! To use ABC, you should have a program that will accept ABC files and produce standard notation as output. There are thousands and thousands of fiddle/celtic/irish/etc tunes in ABC notation. 9. Why do you have some MIDI sites listed? I wanted sheet music! As mentioned previously, there are packages that can read MIDI files and produce standard notation output. Many commercial packages have this capability -- as do many shareware and freeware packages. One you can check out is MidiNotate. You can download it for free and it's extremely capable. It was able to handle several MIDI files that some the commercial packages I have couldn't parse. My personal favorite is a shareware package from France. It's called Melody Assistant ... and it can do most anything. It not only does MIDI, it does ABC, TAB, and WAV! Check it out at Melody Assistant! Back to the Main Menu