Gover M. Koockogey | Sagittarius Dolly

Here’s a little change of pace since today marks the official kickoff of Labor Day Weekend.

A few weeks ago I happened to check out this yard sale in my neighborhood, which had a variety of vintage items from the 1920’s-1960’s. I saw a pile of sheet music that was on sale for 25 cents each. I thumbed through them and I saw that they were really old sheet music, some of which dated as far back as the 1910’s. I was also attracted to the beautiful illustrated covers, which were works of art in ways that the sheet music I used to use when I was learning how to play guitar as a teenager weren’t. (The sheet music I used basically just had the title along with a photograph of the band or singer responsible for the song.) I had never heard of any of these songs but the covers were gorgeous.

So I decided to take a risk by buying a few of them. I didn’t have much money on me so I only purchased around six of these sheet music titles for $1.50. I thought it would be cool to see if I could somehow input the music notes into GarageBand and see what it would churn.

But the big hassle is that there isn’t a sheet music equivalent in GarageBand that I could find. I know that GarageBand is easy for dropping various loops in order to make a song and it’s also good for inputing music using an electric guitar or MIDI keyboard hooked up to the computer but I couldn’t find anything in that software that had an interface I could use for inputing the music notes on printed sheet music.

I looked around for a few alternatives and I found this open source program called MuseScore 2. It has an online sheet music interface where you can drag and drop music notes. What’s even cool is that you can play the piece while you’re working on it (which is great for picking up any wrong music notes) and you can even export the audio as a standalone file. I ultimately brought the audio files into iMovie where I also imported photos of the sheet music covers and I even typed the lyrics to the songs (which is for those who want to sing along). Here are the songs I’ve worked on so far. Enjoy!