Why I Make My Own Sheet Music

I make a lot of sheet music for my students.

With the endless content available online, it might seem strange that I prefer taking the time to make my own sheet music. The vast quantity of musical notation available online belies the fact that much of it is of little use to students.

Even sheet music made by reputable publishers is often found to be lacking when it comes time to start learning a song. Some of the pitfalls of commonly available sheet music fall into broad categories:

Ultimate Guitar Tabs (and similar websites)

For all the promise of the internet, Ultimate Guitar is a great example of where it goes wrong. For every song you can imagine, there are probably ten or even a hundred Tabs made by users on Ultimate Guitar. Are some of them accurate? Probably. Are some of them wildly inaccurate? Certainly. How is a guitar student to know the difference? They can’t. It takes an experienced guitar player to quickly scan through music and see if it makes sense. Add to this the terrible formatting, and the fact that printing the Tabs prints all the adds around the margin, and you have a heap of almost unusable notation.

Note-for-note transcriptions 

The idea of a note-for-note transcription sounds great. If you’re a professional musician playing in an AC/DC cover band, you’re going to want the note-for-note transcription of Back in Black. For the average student, however, it can be daunting to print out sheet music for a song, only to be confronted by 15 pages of small-font notation, with three staves for rhythm guitar, lead guitar and bass. These transcriptions can be hundreds of measures long with any small variation included. Talk about too much information! Looking for the cornerstone riffs from a song can become like searching for a needle in a haystack. Most students want to learn how to play a song so it sounds like what they know, with a reasonable amount of effort. They often are a lot less interested in every pick-scrape, artificial harmonic, palm mute, etc, that are included in note-for-note transcriptions.

Piano/Vocal/Guitar (PVG)

In trying to make sheet music that is of use to many, the PVG format often ends up making sheet music that is of use to none. I am looking at the Hal Leonard PVG transcription of Suzanne by Leonard Cohen as I write. The original song features a beautiful finger-picked guitar as the central musical accompaniment, that in this PVG transcription is reduced to chord diagrams without indication of a picking or strumming pattern. The notation is in the key of C, whereas the original is in the key of B, and nowhere is this noted on the page. 

The piano part always takes the lead in these arrangements, no matter the source material. For Suzanne, the piano is playing a similar rhythm to the original guitar, but for some reason with a walking bass-line that is nowhere to be found in Leonard Cohen’s classic. Playing these quick rhythms with a moving bass on the piano pretty well destroys the fragile beauty of the song. I could not suggest this sheet music to any guitar or piano student wishing to learn how to play this song. Professional musicians playing this arrangement would have a challenge making it feel anything like the original.

Easy Piano/Guitar transcriptions

The problem with easy-play notation is pretty much the inverse of note-for-note transcriptions. How easy is too easy? At what point does oversimplification reduce a piece of music to just a few common chords. It is appealing to think you could learn how to play Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd just by mastering the G, C, D, Em and Am chords, but you’re going to be missing most of your favourite parts of the song if this is all you learn.

For many years of teaching, I did my best to work with my students using sheet music from the above sources. When finding notation online, I’d look at a dozen sites to find the best version for the student to work with. If the notation was too easy or difficult, often I’d end up making amendments by hand on sheets of notation paper. Sometimes I’d write out a whole song in a dictation book. Then came Covid.

I had never used Skype or Zoom prior to 2020. When the first shutdown happened, I realized that it was going to be a long time before teachers and students got back into confined lessons rooms, so I bought a webcam and thought I’d figure out how to teach lessons online from my home. Starting out, I had only a hand-full of students who signed up for online lessons. This was a blessing in a way, as it gave me time and space to figure out how best to serve them.

Making my own sheet music

It dawned on me that I’d have to start making sheet music to share with students as PDFs. There would be no more writing out Crazy Train on page after page of a dictation book! This meant a greater up-front investment of time for me, but in spring of 2020, many of us had a fair bit of time on our hands. It was during this period that I became proficient at making high quality, individualized sheet music. The benefit to students was apparent immediately. I was able to present them with exactly what they needed to learn what they wanted. Everything would be accurate, and at the appropriate level of difficulty for the individual. Everything would be written in standard notation, as well as Tab for guitar.

From then on, I’ve just kept at it. I still use sheet music from other sources when it makes sense, but anytime a better option isn’t easily available, I make it myself.

What follows is an incomplete list of the popular music notation I’ve made in the last few years. It’s no surprise that the Beatles appear on the list nine times!

The Animals—House of the Rising Sun

Arctic Monkeys—Knee Socks

The Beatles—Blackbird

The Beatles—For No One

The Beatles—Here Comes The Sun

The Beatles—Hey Jude

The Beatles—Julia

The Beatles—Let It Be

The Beatles—Martha My Dear

The Beatles—Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

The Beatles—Yellow Submarine

Chuck Berry—Maybellene

Lewis Capaldi—Before You Go

Lewis Capaldi—Hollywood

The Cars—Just What I Needed

Johnny Cash—Hurt

Cracker—Sunday Train

Billie Eilish—The 30th

Elvis Blue—Moon of Kentucky

Elvis—Can’t Help Falling in Love

Fleetwood Mac—Landslide

Fleetwood Mac—Never Going Back Again

Foo Fighters—Everlong

Green Day—Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Green Day—Good Riddance

Green Day—Wake Me Up When September Ends

Vince Guaraldi—Linus and Lucy

Hozier—Jackie and Wilson

Hozier—Would That I

Joan Jett—Bad Reputation

Norah Jones—Come Away With me

Noah Kahan—Stick Season

Yugo Kanno—Yoshikage Kira Theme (Killer)

The Las—There She Goes

John Lennon—Imagine

Henry Mancini—The Pink Panther Theme

Marianas Trench—Good To You

Kacey Musgraves—Merry Go Round

Nirvana—Smells Like Teen Spirit

Pink Floyd—Wish You Were Here

Pixies—Velouria

Olivia Rodrigo—One Step Forward

Ed Sheeran—Afterglow

Harry Styles—Matilda

Harry Styles—Sweet Creatures

Taylor Swift—Invisible String

Taylor Swift—New Year’s Day

Taylor Swift—This Is Me Trying

The White Stripes—Seven Nation Army

Tragically Hip—Fiddler’s Green

Tragically Hi—New Orleans Is Sinking

Tragically Hip—Wheat Kings

Morgan Wallen—Cover Me Up

John Williams—Harry Potter Theme

John Williams—Star Wars Theme