Thursday, April 28, 2005

Guitar Player Magazine & Musicnotes

A couple of weeks ago I picked up the May issue of Guitar Player magazine. It's the first time I have bought this magazine (don't know why it never interested me before) and it's pretty good. Some interesting articles on playing Blues. I was most intrigued by the Lap Steel article (having just taken a lap steel guitar class at Club Passim.)

What also caught my attention was this:
15 SONGS FREE SHEET MUSIC DOWNLOAD
you choose!

So if you were like me, you thought that meant you could download all 15 songs.....ahhh..no. Turns out you get one free download, and the rest are $4.95 each.

The songs are from Musicnotes, and actually, it's probably not a bad deal. I ended up choosing the transcription of Keb Mo's Angelina, since I'm a fan, and have the record (always good to have the recording if you are trying to learn a song!)


Musicnotes software


It was only when I got into the service that I realized I'd tried it once before a long time ago. They provide the sheet music in their own file format, which requires their own viewer software, and you are limited in what you can do with the file; in this case, you can print it once and then you are done...

My printer barfed the first time, but that's when I discovered that the program let's you confirm that the print worked (and try again if it didn't).....so it actually let me print the thing out twice. As I recall, last time I used it, I printed to a PDF file and was able to print the PDF later also (though I didn't try that this time.)

To top it all off, the file has my name on every page, so they are really trying to get you not to distribute it. I have no trouble with the basic idea of limiting the copy to my fair use; it's just obnoxious when those mesaures intrude on your trying to use the thing in what should be an acceptable manner.

Anyway, I might buy the next issue just to get another free song....of course, the magazine is $5.99, so I need to get at least $1 worth of value out of the magazine to come out ahead...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Probably worth the $1 just to get a blog entry out of it

Michael Murie said...

I might even get two out of it...