You want to know where to get free piano sheet music?
If you are a piano teacher, you might have to constantly get new sheet music for your students, which can challenge your budget sometimes. Or you might be a piano player who can’t afford every sheet music you want to learn, which makes it important to know where you can get free piano sheet music.
The truth is that there are a lot of sites that offer free sheet music for piano players. However, keep in mind that some of the songs you’ll be searching for may be copyrighted, which means you won’t be able to find free sheet music for every song you want. The free sheet music that the websites on this list offer are under the Creative Commons License and Public Domain, that is, they are all safe to download and use.
Freescores
Freescores has a huge library of free sheet music for different instruments. When you enter the site, just click on the piano section and you’ll be able to see thousands of free sheet music to choose from. You can also use the search bar to look for specific pieces.
While this site offers sheet music for modern genres as well, their classical collection is really huge, so you have a higher chance to find classical pieces rather than modern music there.
Related: 11 Easy Classical Piano Songs For Beginners
Musescore
Musescore is another great option to get free piano sheet music. What’s great about Musescore is that users upload their own arrangements and transcriptions there, which means you can find piano sheet music even for the rarest songs if somebody made an arrangement and uploaded it on Musescore. I’ve found sheet music several times for songs that didn’t even have a paid sheet music, so I think it’s a really amazing platform.
Another unique thing about Musescore is that it has a toggle play button with which you can hear how the arrangement sounds before you spend your time learning it.
However, to download the sheet music in the PDF, Midi, or MP3 format, you have to pay the annual subscription fee of $49 (as of 2020). Downloading the sheet music in PDF format used to be free, but Musescore changed this feature recently. What I do usually is to follow the score from the website itself without downloading it, because I don’t want to pay for a site that I don’t use as much as Virtual Sheet Music or MusicNotes. You can do the same thing if you don’t mind following the score from the website. It might not be the most convenient way, but it’s still a good option if you are on a budget like me.
8Notes
8Notes is a free sheet music website that is run by David Bruce, who is a British composer and makes most of the arrangements on the site himself. Just like Musescore, some features on the site require you to pay for an annual subscription of $20 (as of 2020), such as 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. Keep in mind that with this method, you will have to do the same thing for all the pages because it doesn’t allow you to download the entire piece in one go. Still, I think it’s a helpful website for piano players.
Virtual Sheet Music
While Virtual Sheet Music operates on a paid basis, it has an amazing free piano sheet music section where you can find high-quality sheet music from different genres. Also, they have a general free sheet music section where two new free sheet music is added every month. After one month, those sheet music switch to the paid section, so you can catch some high-quality sheets if you check the site regularly.
They have also a membership option, by which you can get immediate access to the huge library of piano scores for a year at the price of $37.75 (as of 2020). I personally use this site to get most of my sheet music and find it way more efficient than searching for free sheet music every time for every piece.
Annual membership both saves me time and money because every time I need sheet music, I know where to go and find it without having to pay for every single score I want to learn.
See everything included in Virtual Sheet Music Membership
IMSLP
International Music Score Library Project is the biggest free sheet music platform you can find online. The site allows everyone to scan the music books and sheet music they have that are under the public domain license and upload them on the site. Most of the sheet music on IMSLP is either classical or jazz, so it’s not the greatest place to look for popular songs. However, if you are a classical piano player, you should definitely keep this site at hand.
MUSOPEN
Musopen is a great site mainly because of its easy-to-use navigation. Every part of the website is well-structured and allows you to browse sheet music by form, composer, and period.
Once you find the sheet music you are looking for, you can instantly download it, or even listen to the recordings of the piece that are included below the screen, which makes the searching process much more enjoyable and convenient.
MusicNotes
MusicNotes is another site that operates on a paid basis, but they have also a free section where you can come across some high-quality sheet music that is normally paid. Every month, some sheet music is selected to be featured in the free section, so you might occasionally want to check that part as well.
Conclusion
These were some of the best places to get free piano sheet music online. I hope this list will guide you through finding the scores you want.
Where do you get your sheet music?
Is there any other site you want to add to this list?
Let me know in the comments!
