Searching for new beginner cello sheet music is a process and a half. As students grow and develop on their instruments, the amount of music available to them grows exponentially. For the first stages of their musical journey, please use your orchestra teachers and private teachers as your first line of defense. If you can’t speak with them, let me give you a few resources!
sheetmusicplus.com
The very first website that I used when I started was sheetmusicplus.com. I love this website. This site is best suited for classical music and less pop music. There are an infinite number of scores on this site and there are infinitely many variations of the pieces that you will look up.
Now, when you go to the site, please search the piece and then narrow down the filters. If you are looking for a piece for cello and piano, start there. Once you have put that piece in the search engine, you will have way too many pieces to go through to find the proper one. Go to the filters at this point and select the description that is as close to what you are looking for as possible. A drawback of this site is that there are so many options. You will have to sift through the lot of them to find the right exact version that you are looking for.
musicnotes.com
Musicnotes.com is another fantastic website that is best for searching for beginner cello pop music. I know we all want to play a bit of our favorite pop singer’s songs! You can find anything from old songs by Elvis Presley all the way to BTS’s Dynamite!
There are some classical pieces as well if you cannot find them on sheetmusicplus.com, however, there are a few things to think of. When you look up a piece on this site, there likely will be a huge variant from one version to the next. Be very careful! Some of these editions can be over reductive and in the wrong key so when you sit down to play it, the version that you are looking at won’t sound anything like the pop song you know and love.
On the other hand, there are some editions that are incredibly precise! I personally have looked up songs by Beyoncé that show every single twist and turn she does in her studio recordings. These very exact versions of the pop songs we know can be a bit overwhelming.
IMSLP
Beyond these websites the granddaddy of all music libraries is IMSLP. This is the Holy Grail of music before 50 years ago; due to copyright laws. This is where a majority of us start off looking for our music. IMSLP is a public domain, kind of like an online library of music from pretty much any and every composer for as long as music was written down.
There are some pieces in any of these composers’ catalogs that are missing every once and while. If you are unable to find the piece, you can go to IMSLP’s parent website, wikipedia and find the composer’s full list of pieces, usually.
These are starting points for you and your students. The greatest of all places to search for beginner cello sheet music is obviously, Google. If push comes to shove, you can always google the piece you are looking for. It’s always smart to use Google in conjunction with YouTube as well. YouTube does not have every piece that we may be looking for, but there’s no harm in trying.
Enjoy the process of looking for new beginner cello sheet music!
Happy practicing!
Braxton Alexander Porter