This is a bit of an unusual post for me because I never thought that I would ever learn how to play piano. I’m going to start taking lessons eventually, but for now I’ve just been trying the DIY approach like I did with the guitar and bass.
This idea started about a year ago when I was given a midi keyboard. It has tons of features and even teaches you how to play songs by lighting up the keys, which is fun but not really practical because I can’t remember the songs after I play them through. I have always wanted to be able to use a keyboard as a composing tool to try and help with my guitar and bass song writing, but piano is pretty confusing to me.
I thought I’d try and find something equivalent to a guitar pro tab, but I couldn’t do that either. The only option I had was to try and learn sheet music, which I didn’t think was possible for me without lessons. I found an app called ScanScore and it works quite well at taking existing sheet music and turning it into a playable track on the computer. The idea is that I’ll be able to read sheet music by learning how it is actually played as a song. I’m hoping that I will be able to apply all of this theory to my bass and guitar playing and learn how to tickle the ivories at the same time.
I’ve been using ScanScore for a few days now and it actually works really well. If you have old sheet music lying around, or even a book of sheet music then you can take a picture of it with your smart phone and import it directly into the PC app. All you do is download the Android or iOS app from whichever market place your phone uses. You then link your smartphone to the PC app with a QR code. It works really well.
If you only have digital copies of sheet music then you can import the sheets as a PDF. Once done you will have a copy of the original and the copy side by side on the same screen for comparison. You can then edit the music sheet on the right if you need to or add any missing notations from the original.
Something I have been doing is downloading free piano sheet music that is public domain, and there are tons of examples out there like https://musopen.org/music/. It helps to give you a good idea about how piano music is structured because you can watch the song tracking as it plays, which is nice.
If there are any piano teachers reading this then it could be quite a good tool, especially if you have lessons that need to be imported or exported and printed. I’ll upload some of my progress as I learn more, but for now I am just having a lot of fun with it.
Here are some pictures of the interface if anyone is interested.
The main menu bar when loading the app:
The importing process:
The original scan:
The imported playable scan:
If you pick up anything that needs editing, then you can open the tools here:
You can download the demo version from https://scan-score.com/en/ if you want to try it. What do you guys think?
