Sheet Music

It's been a while since I bought new sheet music and I decided to try getting it through my work.  We don't carry much in store but can order some in.  I was also pleased to use my employee discount.  Yeah!  Usually I'll buy the book instead of songs individually.  This time I picked up:

Leona Lewis, Spirit

Kelly Clarkson, My December

I just realized that there are two different Leona Lewis song books and the one I didn't get has 3 more songs.  Bah!  I guess I'll be ordering the other one.  Angry fist!  I totally suck at piano now since I haven't been playing much.  So frustrating!  Not to mention the fact that our piano is out of tune.  I was thinking about buying a new one but I can't rationalize it since I hardly play now.  I usually just buy sheet music to songs I like to sing.  Since I pretty much taught myself how to play piano, I make a lot of stuff up.  I don't play tempo by how it's written, I play it by how I've heard it or how I think it should sound.  Also I don't like when the music follows the notes you're supposed to be singing.  Usually when I play and sing at the same time, I use the music as a reference and leave out half the notes so that the piano isn't playing the whole melody. That way I can sing the melody however I want and don't have to follow the music exactly.  Rebellious huh?  There are times that I played songs I've never heard before.  I made up the tempo and stuff to how I thought it should sound.  Later after hearing the original, 100% of the time, I thought my way was better.  Ha ha!  I guess it pays to not be influenced by the original.  I'm kind of sad that I really suck at playing piano right now.  The other day I even dug out my notebook with the songs I wrote in high school.  I tried playing them and had a hard time.  I'm really glad now that I actually took the time to write it all out.  It's really time consuming to hand write all parts of a song.  Notes, rests, words, etc.  If I didn't write it out, those songs would be lost forever.  I wrote a song with a friend in high school and modified it to be sung Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.  I put a small group together and we performed it on choir tour.  We only sang it once because I was being an evil tyrant and refused to perform it until I thought we had practiced sufficiently.  It's different when it's your song people are singing.  If it sounds bad, you don't know what people will think, it's a crappy song or crappy singers.  After we sang it someone came and asked for the music and was surprised when I told them they couldn't have it since I wrote it and didn't want it to get out without being copyrighted.  I guess I overreacted since there were already copies out there from the people in the group.  I heard you could seal a copy and mail it to yourself as a form of proof.  As long as you don't open the envelope it's sealed with the date.  I did this after I wrote the song so maybe one day someone will plagiarise me and I can sue them for millions.