Piano Playing – MusicNotes and Video Game Music

I bought a piano back in October, and I am really liking it. I probably don’t play as much as I should be, but I try. Its actually easier for me to play guitar than piano – I can get through more songs without screwing up 🙂

Anyways, even when I was in piano lessons, I really wasn’t into playing classical music and all that, I was more into rock n roll, The Beatles, John Lennon, things like that.

I know I have blogged before about music you buy, that it is the lyrics in the treble clef, which I hate. Like you can listen to a song, and hear them play one thing, and they sing the lyrics, but in the sheet music, the try to incorporate all that into the piano part – I hate that!!

Even so, I still buy some sheet music, and now, I just do it online, and print it off. The site I primarily use is MusicNotes.com – it seems to have the best selection and price. I know Schmitt Music has an online store, I haven’t heard the best things though.

With MusicNotes, you can get music, listen to it before you buy, print off the first sheet before you buy. You can even transpose it before you print, which is exactly what I did yesterday. I have a recording of John Lennon playing “Real Love” on the piano, just him. If you don’t know the song, The Beatles put it out on their Second Anthology in the 90’s – its really the last “new” Beatles song ever. Well, when the Beatles recorded it, the jumped the key up “The song has been sped up 12% from the demo” – so, the default key on the music was too high (it matched the Beatles but not Lennon’s version), so I transposed it down to the right key. And I have been playing it the last day, but yet, I am not playing the music. Looking at the chords, taking bits and pieces, and trying get rid of the damn lyrics in the treble clef notes!!

Where else does a piano playing geek look for music? Video games of course! A while back I found a site with a ton of music from video games. Super Mario Bros. is the ultimate piece, most everyone knows it. There is the Overworld, Underworld, and Underwater themes. I can play Underworld and Underwater themes fairly well, I might even try to record Underwater. The Overworld is a bit tougher. One of my best memories of growing up was playing “The Goonies II” on NES. I remember playing with my cousins and sister. That game, in my opinion, was one of the best. Music was great, just fun game to play. I found the music for that as well! Great stuff, tough though. Fast and crazy. I lost the original link to the site where I got the music, so I will just post up some copies here, they are zip files, containing a midi of the song, and a PDF of the music. I have more than these 4 and maybe I will post them all up on a sub site of my website.