Piano sheet music

Which arrangement you are actually buying

The same title can appear under several arrangement labels, and they are not interchangeable. Piano solo is written for two hands on one instrument. Piano/vocal/guitar, usually shortened to PVG, puts the melody in a vocal line above a simplified piano part with chord symbols — it is the standard format for popular songs, and playing the piano part alone often sounds thin. Easy piano is a genuine re-arrangement, not the original in larger print. Piano four hands is one instrument, two players; two pianos needs two instruments.

If you want the piece as the composer wrote it, look for "piano solo" or an urtext edition. If you want to sing along, PVG is the one. Retailer listings state this inconsistently, which is why we surface the arrangement labels on each result.

What the difficulty labels mean

There is no single grading standard, which is why "easy" from one publisher can defeat a player who is comfortable with another publisher's "intermediate". The exam boards are the closest thing to a common language: ABRSM and Trinity both grade 1 to 8, and most publishers loosely align to them.

Check the specific syllabus or publisher scale behind a grade. An urtext is an editorial approach, not a difficulty level, and original pieces range from relatively approachable to demanding. Inspect the sample for stretches, rhythmic independence, leaps and texture; do not infer a level from a cover or a familiar opening.

Urtext versus performance editions

For anything out of copyright you will meet two kinds of edition. An urtext presents what the composer wrote, with editorial additions marked or absent — Henle, Bärenreiter and Wiener Urtext are the usual names. A performance edition adds fingering, pedalling and phrasing from an editor, which is genuinely useful when you are learning alone and unwelcome when you have your own ideas.

Free archives include a variety of editions. Inspect the editor, publication details, legibility and musical text rather than assuming that free means inaccurate or that a new edition has no editorial intervention. Our edition guide explains how to compare them.

When the free version is the right answer

Anything by a composer who died more than seventy years ago is likely to be in the public domain somewhere, and the archives we index — IMSLP chief among them — hold enormous quantities of it. For sight-reading, for deciding whether you like a piece, or for repertoire you will play once, a free scan is the sensible choice.

Copyright terms differ by country, and a scan that is legal to download in one place may not be in another. Where we link a free source we say so plainly, and we earn nothing from those links.