Educator Must Haves: PhotoScore

For anyone who knows me personally, you have probably heard me sing the praises of PhotoScore by Sibelius. I believe that unless a teacher is able to focus 100% on a student while accompanying them on the piano, they need to either find an accompanist or a recorded accompaniment. I am not a gifted pianist and so while I am happy to accompany my students for warm-ups and sight reading, I used to find myself searching for accompaniments or requesting assistance from friends who could accompany my students. Then I discovered PhotoScore, which has completely solved this problem. If you have the sheet music for a song you can simply scan it into your computer and upload it into PhotoScore. You are able to edit the song to add dynamics, pauses and even change the tempo and key to best fit your needs as well as those of the student. The music can then be saved as a sound file. I import this file into an itunes playlists with the students name, so that it is easy to locate all of their music when they arrive for a lesson. Another benefit to using PhotoScore is that you can save all of these files onto your computer and have digital copies of all of your sheet music easily accessible for you to pull up at a moments notice. While I admit I am not nearly organized enough to have scanned all of my music in to digital files (there is a lot of music!!!) and most frequently use it when I already have a song in mind for a student, it has been a goal of mine to compile all of my music into a database where I can simply pull up any song on my computer instead of searching files for loose sheet music and bookshelves for anthologies I need to flip through to find the song I am looking for.

All in all, I cannot recommend PhotoScore enough. The more time I have spent exploring the program, the more excited I am about it!