[Andy A1S]

You may have a point about limiting the amount of downloads each month, Jazz Cat, but if I didn’t get to choose which 5-7 songs I could download, I’d get bored with that pretty quickly. If there was a limit on the number of downloads that come with membership each month, that wouldn’t be so bad, provided we got to choose which ones.

Sheet music is widely available though, much of it free, so basing it all on that might not be the way to go. Including courses would be good. I’m sure I could learn a lot more from Johnny, but as a teacher, not just as a provider of arrangements and sheet music. There isn’t really a shortage of that, or places to get it from.

[Andy A1S]

Well, getting hold of some sheet music and just trying to play through it is my usual approach, these days, but I’m open to new ideas 🙂 Lessons on technique, rather than just on playing particular tunes would be good.

I’ve got a lot of musuc form freemidi.org (as MIDI files imported into MuseScore), and haven’t even scratched the surface yet, so something other than just the sheet music would be more useful. Those files mostly contain a backing group – I use Edit->Instruments to hide the parts I’m not going to play. I’ve sometimes tried to play along with it on electronic instruments, but mostly I just play it solo.

Personally, I’m only aiming to entertain myself so the amount of progress I’m making is secondary to that. I’ve been neglecting my saxes in favour of brass, lately, because you can’t easily mute a sax, and I’m trying not to get lynched by the neighbours / horde of marauding villagers with the pitch forks and the flaming torches… Lessons on technique for playing a sax really quietly would be ideal 🙂

I’m gathering it might be quite expensive, by my meager standards, if you need to charge for it monthly though, Johnny. I’ll wait and see.

[Andy A1S]

Maybe make it an annual rate? That way if someone downloads everything and doesn’t renew, it will be a reasonably fair deal for both parties.

I’ve subscribed to material from two teachers that way in the past (one flute, one sax – who will remain nameless, for now), and both were “all you can eat” deals, for an annual membership.

It’s easier to set that up than trying to restrict the amount of downloads somehow. It also meant people didn’t have to be in a hurry to get it all, so most of them probably didn’t try to download as much as they could on day one.

The reason I stopped subscribing wasn’t because I’d downloaded everything, it was because I didn’t feel they were really adding anything new that was of interest to me. If you keep adding new stuff, Johnny, there’s an incentive to renew for the next year.

What I would like to see is sheet music in MusicXML format, so it can be opened in MuseScore (which is free, from musescore.org) or Finale (which isn’t).

I use MuseScore a lot, often taking free MIDI tunes and finding the part I want to play. I can then rearrange it so it fits my screen better, to read while I’m practising, get it to play the tune to me if I can’t work it out from just the music (very useful!) and change the transposition for my other instruments, or change the key.

The sax teacher I used to subscribe to had a habit of making his PDF sheet music so that no more than a dozen bars fitted full width on the screen at once, which used to frustrate the hell out of me. If I’d had them as MusicXML or MuseScore files, it wouldn’t have been a problem, because I could have laid them out to show the whole tune at once, most of the time. Trying to scroll a computer screen with a mouse while playing a sax just doesn’t work.

[Andy A1S]

Got it now. Thanks for sorting that out.

This thread seems to disappear and reappear… Maybe the forum software is a bit buggy?

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