Showin’ your chops on those piles of sheet music

Show me a musician and I’ll show you someone who has at least a three foot stack of sheet music squirreled away somewhere.

My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many pages of sheet music there are filling bins and flexing cheap shelving in my house.

What do I have and Where is it?

The biggest problem we face is knowing what we have and where it is. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of classical and jazz guitar sheet music, but if I need to find Villalobos’ Choros no. 1, where do I look?

Shortly after I bought my ScanSnap, I began scanning in all of my sheet music (I have left much of my wife’s collection untouched—I’m sure you’ll understand). In most cases, I simply hacked the spine off of the original book and fed the sheets through the scanner. Now, I have less paper in the house and my music is searchable.

In most cases I didn’t bother to run OCR on the documents since there is little in the way of printed words on most sheet music that is worth indexing. I did take care to name the files well.

If you ever hope to find your music on your computer, make sure you include at least the composer/artist and song title in the file name.

Is this really cutting down on paper?

Whenever I find what I’m looking for I might play it directly off of the computer screen, but it is more likely that I’ll print it out. Doesn’t this kind of negate the idea of removing paper from my home? Not really. Think about it—most sheet music is never played. We have books with hundreds of songs in them and we play only  a handful. That’s just the way it is.

The fact that I print out five or ten pages in a month does not negate the many hundreds of pages that were scanned and then recycled.

Great for Music Lessons

I started taking jazz lessons again a month or two back, and my teacher gave me some lead sheets, with all kinds of useful annotations on them. As soon as I was home, I scanned those babies in, so I would not risk losing the valuable information. I also went through all of my notes from prior lessons and scanned them in as well. These kinds of things are precisely the sorts of paper that tend to get lost in some mismash of unsorted music.

Now, I can type in “Four” in my favorite PDF library application and find the lead sheet for Miles Davis’ Four.

Maybe you don’t have that many notebooks full of music lesson notes, but when you have been trying (poorly) to learn for as many years as I have, those notebooks begin to proliferate. Just scan them all in, give them some good filenames, add some keywords to help, and you’re in business.

What about copyright?

It seems that the jury is still out on digitizing works you own. There’s one fellow who made a right awesome device for scanning in textbooks in minutes, by photographing the pages. That guy’s machine has spurred much debate about whether or not you have the right to digitize your own stuff.

On the one hand, you bought the book and paid for it, so it would seem that fair use covers this; on the other hand, publishers are eager to monetize digital media, reselling the same works to you if they can.

So, is Daniel Reetz’s butt-kickin’ book scanner legal?

That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

Google was recently forced to pay $125 million to settle with angry book publishers and authors who claimed copyright infringement as a result of the search giant’s book-scanning project.

But not so individual users who already own the book, says Samuelson. If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is “fine, and fair use,” she says. “Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work,” says Samuelson.

(Source: wired.com)

Here’s another take on this:

Question

I bought a book for school, can I make a copy of the book for my own use to write on so I don’t write in the book and can get my money back when I return the book to the campus store.

Accepted Answer

You have the right to make a copy of the book you purchased as long as you are using the copy for your personal use. The copyright laws merely prevent you from making copies to sell or distribute.

(Source: justanswer.com)

Of course, if you go passing your PDF documents around to all of your friends, all bets are off.

Final thoughts
Music is a hobby that seems to accumulate great stacks of paper, but these music sheets are peculiar in that you only need one or two out of every hundred. Why not digitize the whole lot and keep those book shelves from sagging?