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Do you know about forScore?
https://forscore.co/

2 years ago many places started enforcing partial / full lockdowns and people stayed home. We spend more time in front of the screen by default. The time I saved not having to travel to and from music lessons and the office was used to arrange a piece for piano I want to learn but written for other instruments. Can't find a good piano arrangement online.

🎻 The Vivaldi piece I'm learning to play is with a music group. I'm not spending an hour to copy a piece for playing it just once. We may eventually perform it somewhere 6 months later when public places start to lift gathering restrictions. It's a rather technical piece. The amount of time I'd spend practicing the wrong notes from a less readable copy would be better spent doing a clean copy so that I can play the right notes the first time.

No Facebook, instagram or Tiktok so a lot of free times.

Maybe this will be illustrative of why it's worth the trouble



Other than making a beautiful copy out of a barely legible fax quality copy, in the process figuring out the fingering I found that distributing some voice between two hands worked much better - so instead of littering the score with LH and RH I might as well make the redistribution explicit between the two staves. In a sense I'm making my own performing edition, so I can confidently play from it - now, and maybe years down the road, too.

Completely understandable!


No. Do I understand correctly that it can read any pdf file that I may have and make a score out of it that I can format according to my wishes? That would be something to consider indeed.

Yes I used Musescore for that.

I rewrote part of I think a Chopin etude where Chopin putted shiploads of accidentals in, which seemed totally unnecesary as he was notating in the wrong key. I changed the key in that section so that almost all accidentals could be removed.

Another time I rewrote an etude to another key, because I needed a particular practice in minor instead of major.

For adding fingerings, I use a pdf from the web and annotate it with a pdf editor


Yes copying and translating scores is a HUGE amount of work. That's why we have publishers and why we get sheet music from them if possible.

Exactly. Lately I have started buying more and more physical printed scores from high-quality publishers like Henle as I'm getting tired of the bad PDFs and the crappy printouts. Also, a physical music library on a bookshelf somehow feels more real. I'm more compelled to just pick a book and start playing from it for fun.

The last piece I worked on is a piano arrangement of an orchestral piece. It’s not common to hear it played as piano solo so doing a personal arrangement was inevitable. If a piano version that sounds like the original is available, all the effort wouldn’t be necessary. On the other hand, it’s a brain exercise working with parts notated in 3 clefs (treble, alto, bass) simultaneously and making the piano version playable.