Create blank sheet music paper online

It’s the end of a long week, and you’ve been working at your computer with all kinds of electronics surrounding you. Wouldn’t it be nice to take a step back and time and write some music with pencil and paper? (And no, not the digital versions of “paper” and “pencils” on an iPad.)

Finding blank music paper used to be both exhausting and exhilarating — locating a nearby store that was open, and hoping they had the right size and staff configuration to suit your inspiration at the time. One of the most commonly found brands you could find in a store was Judy Green Music Papers. That brand lives on, in the form of an online store run by AFS Printing, where you can find score pads, manuscript paper, music pads, blank manuscript, and loose sheets.

But if you have access to a computer and a printer, you can print your own custom blank sheet music paper. The internet is full of options, but one of the better ones is via a site called BlankSheetMusic.net. It’s been around since 2003, and offers an array of browser-based tools to configure paper to suit many needs.

BlankSheetMusic.net is free of charge. It’s ad-supported, so when you visit the site, it will look something like this:

Depending on the height and width of your browser, some of the menu or toolbar items may be consolidated into menus to save space.

Clicking on Help will open a guided tutorial that will walk you through how to do things like add clefs; start with one of their premade templates; shrink or grow the staff size (fitting more or fewer staves on the page); set the page size, margins, and orientation; and even pre-set key and time signatures.

At their archive, there are plenty of pre-made templates, so before you start from scratch, it’s worth exploring these to see if once of them matches what you’re already looking for. Even if it’s not a precise match, you can start with one of them and customize it further by clicking the “Go” button.

It’s not immediately obvious, but if you click on a staff, you can further customize its appearance, including changing the clef, the height (staff size), adding braces or brackets, and duplicating it (cloning) it to add more staves. Clicking the chevron will allow you to cycle through the staves without exiting the dialog.

Admittedly, this all got a bit fiddly the more that I adjusted the options, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to save one’s work. It would be interesting if a fee-based version were offered that removed ads and allowed for saving; on the other hand, I can understand the proprietor of the site not wanting to have to manage such a system and the burden of dealing with user payments and accounts.

Still, as long as I was willing to forgo some of the customization options, I was able to create a perfectly usable 11″ x 17″ (tabloid-size) PDF in hardly any time at all. Of course, a large-format printer is required to print it! You can download the PDF here.

Naturally, if you have a need to refine such a template and save it, you’re better off setting that up in an actual software program like Sibelius or Dorico, although because those programs are more geared towards creating music notation within the program, and not blank staves, getting it to behave in this manner can be a little tricky in its own right.

So, it’s nice to know about BlankSheetMusic.net for the times when a browser-based tool is all you have access to, and you need to quickly pull out that quill pen to get your musical thoughts down on parchment without too much else getting in the way of your brilliant ideas.

Do you have a favorite way of creating blank manuscript paper in a pinch? Let us know in the comments.