InTune

Musicnotes.com Launches Guitar Guru 3 with $10,000 Give-a-way in Guitar Guru Sessions

Posted on Sep 02, 2009 by Bill Aicher (Director of Marketing).

Madison, WI – September 2, 2009 – Musicnotes, Inc., the market leader in downloadable sheet music, announced today it recently launched Guitar Guru 3, the latest major upgrade to Musicnotes’ popular Guitar Guru software platform.

To celebrate this release, Musicnotes.com is giving away $10,000 in Guitar Guru Sessions starting Thursday, September 3rd 2009 at 3:00 p.m. CDT.

Guitar Guru provides an enhanced interface to help guitarists and bass guitarists learn to play their favorite songs through downloadable Guitar Guru Sessions. Currently, the ever-growing catalog features over 1,500 songs including artists such as Metallica, Jason Mraz, Green Day, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Muse, Ozzy Osbourne and more!

Some of the new features in Guitar Guru 3 include:

• Better, More Contemporary Look and Feel. New user interface includes a scalable fretboard and enhanced music notation.
• Tempo Change with Correct Pitch. Musicians can slow down or speed up audio playback while maintaining the correct pitch..
• Precision Audio-Syncing. The queue position of CDs and audio files, including MP3s, can now be matched to the Session to within 1/10 of a second. (PC only)

The $10,000 in Guitar Guru Sessions will be given out to the first 1,000 customers in $10 increments.

For more details on how you can be a part of this Guitar Guru Give-a-way, visit www.musicnotes.com/guitarguru at 3:00 p.m. CDT on Thursday, September 3rd.

About Musicnotes: Musicnotes, Inc. offers an online catalog of almost 100,000 digital sheet music titles, built on the strength of content agreements with Alfred Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, Faber Music Ltd, Sony/ATV Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, Disney Music Publishing, Cherry Lane Music Company, Peermusic, Word Music, EMI Christian, Bug Music and many others. Musicnotes is included in Internet Retailer Magazine’s list of the Top 500 Online Retailers and was recently selected by Internet Retailer as a “Hot 100″ site for 2009.

In 2008, Musicnotes.com purchased and re-launched MXTabs.net, turning it into the web’s first “free and legal” guitar, bass and drums tab community.

On the Web: http://www.musicnotes.com and http://www.mxtabs.net.

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Alfred Music Publishing and Musicnotes.com Partner to Honor Les Paul’s Memory with a Free Guitar Lesson Download of “Over the Rainbow”

Posted on Aug 27, 2009 by Bill Aicher (Director of Marketing).

Musicnotes.com has partnered with Alfred Music Publishing to offer music lovers everywhere a free Guitar Guru Session and guitar tab download of “Over the Rainbow” to honor Les Paul’s memory.

Now through midnight on September 2, 2009, visitors to Musicnotes.com can download a free, interactive Guitar Lesson (including matching guitar tab that’s worth $7.95) for “Over the Rainbow.” This particular arrangement was arranged by Grammy award-winning artist Aaron Stang, from Alfred Music Publishing to match the performance recorded by Les Paul and Chet Atkins and featured on the album, ‘Masters of the Guitar – Together.’

“Les Paul closed every show at the legendary jazz club Iridium in New York City with an instrumental version of this song,” said Tim Reiland, Chairman of Musicnotes.com. “This song has a very emotional meaning for musicians everywhere.”

In lieu of payment, Musicnotes and Alfred Music Publishing encourage users who choose to download the song to send donations to the Les Paul Foundation, 236 W. 30th St., Seventh Floor, New York, N.Y. 10001.

The free download is available online at http://www.musicnotes.com/free (now through midnight, September 2, 2009). Be sure to watch a video of Les Paul playing Over the Rainbow on YouTube!.

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New Musicnotes Premieres and Sheet Music from Your Song Requests

Posted on Aug 18, 2009 by Monica.

Can you believe that summer is just about over? We’ve been getting through quite a few song requests and we’re happy to offer you a lot of new songs you’ve requested. For example, you might be interested in the song Only You Can Love Me This Way by Keith Urban. In addition to a lot of great, new titles, we’re pleased to announce several Musicnotes Premieres. For the first time, you can enjoy downloading digital sheet music for these favorite artists and songs that you’ve requested.

You may recall a while back we told you that Musicnotes and Tunecore Team Up To Offer Artist Sheet Music. We just added sheet music for A Drop In The Ocean by Ron Pope today. Ron is a popular artist that many of you have requested. Watch for more sheet music from Ron and other TuneCore artists including Gavin Mikhail and William Fitzsimmons.

Also on the new song requests front, you may remember we did an interview with Kevin Kern. Kevin had asked you to recommend which songs to put up from his new selection of sheet music. We’re proud to announce we have just added three new songs: Remembering the Light, Keepers of the Flame and Sweet Dreams, Helena.

Here is a list of some other artists we’ve added sheet music or new arrangements for:

• Demi Lovato – Here We Go Again

• Wilco with Feist – You and I
• Regina Spektor – Folding Chair We’ll have the rest of Regina’s songs from her new album Far on the site soon.
• Jason Aldean – Big Green Tractor also as a guitar tab for Big Green Tractor, too. Guitar Guru Session coming soon.
• Elvis Costello – Added three, new songs. Sulphur to Sugarcane, My Mood Swings and Poor Fractured Atlas.

Thank you to everyone who requested songs from Musicnotes.com. If you’re interested, feel free to ask us to add sheet music for your favorite song or artist. Even though we can’t honor every request, we do read through and try to add as many of your requests as we can.

Happy practicing!

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New Songs that You’ve Requested!

Posted on Jul 10, 2009 by Monica.

In our continued effort to offer you the songs you want to play, we have quite a few song titles that went live this week on our site. It really means a lot to us when we can offer sheet music for songs you like, and not just because we sell it. Many of us here are either musicians or music lovers in our own right, so we understand what it’s like to fall in love with a song.

Here are quite a few, new songs that you have requested.

• Fly With Me sheet music by the Jonas Brothers.
• Lovegame sheet music by Lady Gaga. COMING SOON!
• The Calculation sheet music by Regina Spektor.
• In the Hands of God sheet music by the Newsboys.
• Gone Too Soon sheet music by Usher.
• PYT sheet music by Michael Jackson.
• The Climb guitar tab by Miley Cyrus. *Guitar Guru Session is coming soon.
• Forgiven and Loved sheet music by Jimmy Needham.

If you are looking for a particular song title and would like to request sheet music from Musicnotes.com, please feel free to use our song suggestion tool to make your requests. Unfortunately, we can’t fulfill every song request you ask for (there’s only so many of us here…) but we make every effort to do so.

Thanks again and enjoy your new songs!

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Deciphering Singer Pro Sheet Music and Finding Your Vocal Range

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Monica.

Are you inspired to practice your singing? Want to sing one of the latest hit songs from your favorite performers? You may have noticed that we offer something called “Singer Pro” editions of our sheet music. This type of sheet music provides you with the ability to sing the vocal line for your favorite song with a piano accompaniment. Take a look:

These measures are from the spiritual Wade in the Water. You can see that the vocal line is separated from the piano accompaniment, and that the accompaniment complements the singer’s voice. Our Singer Pro sheet music is a type of scoring where the melody line is not included in the piano arrangement. If you sing in a choir or play any other instruments like flute or saxophone, you’ll be familiar with this type of sheet music because it’s intentionally composed to highlight and complement the vocal line.

Our catalog of Singer Pro sheet music also offers something to help you decide if the key the song is in will fit your vocal range. On the right-hand side of our products, you’ll see something called “Quick Details.” Pictured here are the Quick Details for the popular song Viva La Vida by Coldplay.

Scoring: – This tells you what style of sheet music arrangement the song is in. For more about the types of products we offer, visit our earlier post about piano sheet music notation.
Instruments: – In this section, you’ll find information about your vocal range and whether or not backup vocals are included in the piece. C4 refers to “middle C” on a piano, or the “middle octave.” Read more about deciphering the numbers in our comments about vocal ranges below.
Pages: – This number reflects the total number of pages in your sheet music once you download it.
Average Rating: – This rating is an average of your reviews for our sheet music. If you’re interested in reviewing sheet music on our site, we recommend reading our blog post entitled How to Review Sheet Music on Musicnotes.com.

At a glance, the Quick Details will help you find out if you can sing your favorite song. If you can’t, you might want to see if there is a transposition available or request one from us. First, you do need to find your vocal range in order to make a good assessment.

How to Find Your Vocal Range

To find your vocal range, you’ll need to figure out what the lowest and highest notes you can comfortably sing are. Before you test your vocal limits, we recommend warming up your voice with a few exercises. If you don’t know of any choral exercises, try singing a children’s song or a tune you’re really comfortable with. (Remember the scene from The Little Mermaid where Ariel was showing off her voice? That’s a great example of a vocal exercise!)

In this particular singing warm-up, you don’t need to worry about volume or technique. Once you’ve “warmed up,” you’ll want to start by finding middle C (which is represented as C4 on our sheet music). The number “4″ represents an octave on the keyboard, so all of the notes in the “C” octave, starting with middle C will have a “4″ after it. The next octave will start with C5; the previous with C3 and so on. Your vocal range will be determined by the lowest note you can sing comfortably to the highest note. A song’s vocal range is listed the same way; from the highest note to the lowest note in the sheet music.

Let’s match up a few vocal ranges to some of our songs to show you how important your range is. Say that you find out your vocal range is from G3 to E5. Looking at the Quick Details above, you see that the range for Viva La Vida is from Eb4 to Ab5. That means the vocal line reaches a higher register because the lowest note is an E flat above middle C and stretches to an A flat above high C. In this case, your range wouldn’t match up with the song because you can’t comfortably sing a high A flat. For this song, you’ll probably need a transposition of the piece that would fit within your vocal range. For Wade in the Water on the other hand, the range listed is between A3 to D5. Your singing voice would be able to comfortably handle that song.

We hope our look into sheet music for singers has helped you today. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to post them here in the comments!

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Love Piano Sheet Music? Learn about Types of Notation!

Posted on Apr 13, 2009 by Monica.

Notation is the way music is represented by written symbols. Symbols can include notes or other markings that indicate how to play your song. A few of you had asked what some of those musical symbols mean, and our production team recommended this list of modern musical symbols which includes everything from a “staff” to the “fermata” symbol, which looks like a bird’s eye.

Did you know that sheet music is a form of music notation? There are several different ways that a song can be written into sheet music. Often, the notation may change depending upon the arrangement, complexity and musicians involved in the piece. For example, our Singer Pro sheet music features an independent vocal line that is separated from the piano accompaniment. Whenever possible, our Singer Pro piano accompaniments are notated just as you hear on your favorite artists’ recordings. As another example, there are multiple ways that music notation for guitarists can be rendered, too.

Piano Music Notations

Here are some other piano sheet music notations that you might be interested in learning more about.

Notation Style	Example
Piano/Voice/Guitar (PVG) Typically, this notation offers the piano part, vocal line and guitar chord frames. You might also see the vocal part repeated in the piano part. Piano/Vocal/Chords (PVC) Typically the music notation offers the piano part, vocal line, and chord names above the staff. You might also see the vocal part repeated in the piano part.
Piano Solo This type of music notation doesn’t offer a vocal line, because it’s meant to be performed as a piano solo. These notations may or may not offer chord names as well.
Easy Piano This type of music notation is geared toward beginning to elementary level piano students. Sheet music may often includes lyrics, but isn’t listed as a separate vocal line. Did you know that easy piano arrangements can almost always be performed as a piano solo? However, easy piano arrangements are “abridged” and do not always contain complete lyrics. Like the piano solo notation, you may or may not find chord names above the staff.
Five Finger Piano If you’re learning how to play piano, you know how important fingering is! In this style of piano music notation, notes are numbered by finger and hands stay in one place over the same keys throughout. Typically, five finger piano notation offers the melody line of your favorite songs, but it also might include an optional teacher accompaniment.
Big-Note Big-Note notation refers to sheet music that features larger notes. These songs may include notation for easy level piano, but not necessarily. Big-Note notation is more about the “size” of the notes than the level of complexity. We recommend reviewing any songs you wish to download with big-note notation before you purchase them to ensure that the song fits your level of playing ability.
Letter or E-Z Play Today If you’re looking for the easiest type of music notation that we sell, then you’ll want to look for Letter or E-Z Play Today notation. Typically, these arrangements only focus on the right hand melody of your favorite songs and include large notes with the letters printed right in the notes.

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Chopin, Ask Musicnotes and U2 in The Whole Note

Posted on Apr 09, 2009 by Monica.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Chopin, “Chopin’s music for the piano combined a unique rhythmic sense (particularly his use of rubato), frequent use of chromaticism, and counterpoint. This mixture produces a particularly fragile sound in the melody and the harmony, which are nonetheless underpinned by solid and interesting harmonic techniques.

He took the new salon genre of the nocturne, invented by Irish composer John Field, to a deeper level of sophistication. Three of Chopin’s twenty-one Nocturnes were only published after his death in 1849, contrary to his wishes. He also endowed popular dance forms, such as the Polish mazurek and the Viennese waltz, with a greater range of melody and expression. Chopin was the first to write ballads and scherzi as individual pieces. He also took the example of Bach’s preludes and fugues, transforming the genre in his own Préludes.”

Musicnotes.com is proud to feature this classical composer known for his emotionally-charged works on our classical sheet music page. We’ve added dozens of Chopin sheet music that you can download for your next concert or practice for our Musicnotes.com YouPerform Contest.

Choose from over one-hundred and ninety different arrangements of Chopin sheet music for your needs. Remember, many of these songs are Musicnotes Editions, too!

Did you Ask Musicnotes about Transpositions? Here’s our Answer!

Many of your questions that we received were related to transpositions for sheet music. Specifically, how can you get your sheet music transposed to the key that is more comfortable for you, your choir or your band to play.

When songs are written into sheet music, they’re frequently set in keys that are comfortable for most players and singers. If an “originally-recorded in” key is noted on the sheet, Musicnotes.com tries to offer you a corresponding transposition.

You can transpose many of our sheet music downloads at the time of your purchase, but at this time we don’t offer any tools that allow you to transpose the songs yourself. If you have a song that you want in a different key, we’ll be happy to transpose it for you! Just contact our Musicnotes Customer Service department and request your transposition. Make sure that you give us a little bit of advance notice when you’re requesting transpositions so we can ensure we’re hitting the “right notes.”

Watch for an upcoming post next week where we share more answers for Ask Musicnotes!

Sheet Music for U2 Album “No Line on the Horizon”

U2 made waves earlier last month with the release of their new album, No Line on the Horizon. The CD is a departure from what we’ve come to identify as “classic” U2, and embraces old sounds in new and innovative ways. From the upbeat Get Your Boots On to the lovely melody White As Snow, U2’s new musical venture highlights a potpourri of musical styles that range from 70s throwbacks to world music.

Now you can be a part of this musical journey by playing guitar tab or sheet music for No Line On the Horizon by U2. If you’re interested in learning more about U2’s new album, read Rolling Stone’s Review of No Line on the Horizon.

That’s all for this week’s edition of The Whole Note. Remember, stay sharp and keep practicing!

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Had a Song Suggestion? Here’s a Few of Your Requests!

Posted on Mar 12, 2009 by Monica.

Seems like only yesterday when we posted about our continued efforts to help you find your song. We’re not ready to make our big announcement yet, but we can tell you that we’ve made significant changes on the back end to get ready a change. Before we revisit the song suggestion tool for those of you who are new to Musicnotes, here’s the Top Five most requested songs that are now available on Musicnotes.com. These are songs that YOU asked for, and are now available through our site for the US and Canada.

One Pair of Hands by Carroll Roberson
Never Say Never by The Fray
Where the Story Ends by The Fray
Check Yes Juliet by We The Kings
Womanizer by Britney Spears

Earlier this year we talked about how we were making improvements to our Musicnotes song suggestion tool. In the post where we had explained How to Suggest your Song to Musicnotes.com, we had mentioned a few other songs that you had requested:

If you can’t find sheet music for the song that you’re looking for, we encourage you to use our song suggestion tool. We take your requests seriously, and have added several songs over the past, few months to our website including: sheet music for the Twilight soundtrack, Mistletoe by Colbie Caillat and Fidelity by Regina Spektor.

Thanks to all of you who suggested songs. As we mentioned earlier this week on Twitter, sometimes some music never even gets to print (or digital format) for many reasons. Some songwriters never even consider releasing the song as sheet music because the film they wrote for didn’t do as well as they expected. In some cases, some artists release sheet music in specific areas of the world, like Australia, but don’t make the songs available elsewhere.

Even though realizing that there are issues with an artist or a song is definitely not the fun part of reading your song requests, we are really happy when we can fulfill your requests. Thanks to you, we just celebrated your five millionth digital download since Musicnotes first started. We hope you’ll join us as we raise a glass to you today. Cheers to fulfilling your favorite song requests and celebrating the next five million!!!

Now, what are you reading our blog for… Grab your sheet music and play or sing your favorite song today!

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How to Review Sheet Music on Musicnotes.com

Posted on Feb 16, 2009 by Monica.

Did you know that Musicnotes.com customers can review the sheet music they’ve purchased on our site? Sheet music reviews can be pretty subjective, because musicians and singers might have different levels of proficiency. That’s one of the reasons why we designed the reviews the way we did. Customers can score sheet music based on its difficulty, the quality of the arrangement and its accuracy. Combined with the ability to add personal comments, these star ratings offer a great perspective on the downloadable sheet music we have on our site before you purchase them.

Take a look at the customer sheet music reviews for the song, “Viva La Vida.” The “reviews tab” is the fifth tab that appears underneath the sheet music and allows customers to see the reviews they’ve written.

In order to write a review for the sheet music you’ve downloaded from our site, you need to create an account that allows you to have a personal profile with us. What details you’d like to display in your profile are entirely up to you; some customers let others know that they are music teachers or students. This helps the community-at-large understand the perspective of the sheet music reviewer and provides you with a place to list your preferences. For example, a beginning pianist will have a much different opinion on the difficulty of a piece than someone who may have a bit experience (see an example). By gaining insight into the reviewer, the person reading the review will be better equipped to make a meaningful decision regarding whether or not the arrangement is right for his or her skill level.

We talked about how customer profiles work on our site in an earlier post, Four Reasons to Fill Out your Customer Profile and Preferences. As stated in that article, one of the other benefits to filling out your Musicnotes profile is to save money at Musicnotes.com!

Get a $5 Off Coupon for Filling out your Preferences – If you haven’t done so already, by filling out your customer profile and preferences you’ll get a $5 Coupon to use for your next purchase. All you need to do is fill out your customer profile in the way that you’re most comfortable with to get the offer. You do not need to opt in for a public profile or sign-up for the newsletter to get the coupon. To get an idea of a partial public profile, here’s a link to my Musicnotes.com customer profile. You’ll see that there were areas I chose to make private.

Here are a few other examples of how sheet music reviews display on our site: Read the sheet music review of Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles or the comments on the sheet music review of Love Song by Sara Bareilles.

If you haven’t created a customer profile, we hope you consider taking the time to review the sheet music you buy, and encourage you to read other reviews on our site.

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Follow this List of Your Favorite Musicians and Bands on Twitter!

Posted on Jan 15, 2009 by Monica.

Are you using Twitter to interact with your friends and family? Twitter is a micro-blogging service where you can send links and brief bits of news to your followers, reply to “Tweets” and get the latest news from people you follow. If you are already using Twitter, then you might want to consider follow your favorite bands and musicians, too! (We hope that you “follow” Musicnotes! Our Twitter account is located at: @music_notes.) Well, we’ve scoured the web to find a nice, long list of musicians and bands who have embraced this medium.

Bands and Musicians on Twitter

This is a long list of bands and musicians who are on Twitter whose musical styles range from pop to classical. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but as far as we can tell, these accounts represent the “official” band or performer. Sometimes, it can be hard to tell whether or not the Twitter ID is actually the person you’re looking for, but we’ve done our research and believe these to be accurate. If you find an inaccuracy, please comment below and we will remove from this list.

You’ll notice that there is a healthy mix of indie, popular and legendary music icons in this list. Don’t be afraid to check out bands or performers you’ve never heard of; many of these Twitter accounts have a link to their MySpace page so you can check out their music. Today’s unsigned band might very well be tomorrow’s superstar!

Are you in a band? Do you write songs? Love music? Whether you are a fan of a band, songwriter, musician, singer or you are one yourself — please add your Twitter account to this list! Let’s keep the music flowing and support musicians and songwriters everywhere!

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2008: Highlights from Musicnotes.com

Posted on Jan 12, 2009 by Bill Aicher (Director of Marketing).

Whew! We’re already a few weeks into 2009, and it’s only just now starting to sink in.  2008 was a tremendous year for us at Musicnotes and, as usual, the holiday season was extraordinarily hectic (in that good kind of way, though).  Now that I’ve had a chance to finally take a step back and catch my breath, I’ve also had a chance to take a good, long look at everything that happened in 2008 – and there was a lot.  So much so, that there’s no way I could do everything justice.  There were quite a few highlights though, and if you haven’t been keeping a close eye on Musicnotes lately, I’ve put together a little list of the big ones.

(more…)

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