So Long And Thanks For All The Fish Sheet Music

Where to Find and How to Work With This Sheet Music

Getting your hands on legit sheet music for So Long And Thanks For All The Fish is one of those mildly frustrating exercises. The album came out in 1989 as a Hitchhiker's Guide companion, and while the songs are reasonably well-known among fans, the publishing situation is a mess. Some tracks are by The Moody Blues, some by other artists, and the instrumental/theme material doesn't have a single authoritative source. You won't find a clean, official folio sitting on Amazon ready to ship. Your best bet is to check the major sheet music databases first. Musicnotes and Sheet Music Plus tend to have arrangements, but the quality varies wildly between community uploads and professionally published versions. The arrangements you find on user-submitted sites are hit or miss. I've seen key signatures wrong, tempo markings that don't match the recording, and chord symbols that are just guesses. If you're playing piano or guitar and want something playable, the user arrangements on Musicnotes are usually serviceable if you cross-reference them against the original tracks. Spend about twenty minutes comparing the sheet music to the actual recording before you commit to learning it. The time investment pays off when you realize someone transcribed the bridge in the wrong key.

For a more reliable route, try contacting a music copy shop or a local music store and asking them to order the arrangement through channels. It costs more and takes longer, but you get something that's actually accurate. One time I had a copy shop recreate a page because the PDF I'd downloaded was missing three measures in the middle section. Took about a week and cost around forty dollars. The version I ended up using was worth it because I didn't have to figure out what was missing by ear. Another angle is looking into the original publisher. Some of the tracks on the album were published by specific music companies, and if you can identify which publisher handled a given song, you can often get a legitimate printed arrangement through their website or through an authorized dealer. The Moody Blue's contribution, for example, has its own publishing lineage separate from the rest of the soundtrack. Here's a detail most people miss: the instrumental version of the theme is actually easier to find than some of the vocal tracks. That's because it shows up in various compilation and reference materials more often. If you're looking for the main thematic material rather than a specific song with lyrics, focus your search on the instrumental arrangements and you'll save yourself a lot of dead ends.

The tempo marking is another thing worth paying attention to. Several arrangements I've seen list it far too fast compared to the recording. The original has a deliberate, almost languid feel to it, and if you practice it at the speed written in a bad arrangement, it just sounds rushed and wrong. Check the beat per minute against the track before you bother memorizing anything. If you play an instrument that isn't piano or guitar, your options narrow considerably. Brass and woodwind arrangements exist but are harder to track down. A lot of musicians in this situation end up downloading a piano reduction and transposing it themselves. It works fine if you know your transposition rules cold, which not everyone does. I usually recommend writing out the transposed part on paper first before attempting to play it sight-read. Doing it straight from a transposed PDF tends to produce a lot of wrong notes until you catch your mistakes. There's also the matter of copyright. A lot of thesheet music floating around on random websites isn't legally distributed, and depending on where you are and how you plan to use it, that matters. Public performance, recording, or even selling arrangements based on unauthorized sheet music can get you into trouble. Stick to licensed sources whenever possible, especially if you're performing publicly or recording covers.

The whole process from finding the right arrangement to actually learning the piece usually takes me about two to three hours for a single track, assuming the arrangement is decent. If I have to verify and correct it, that jumps to maybe four or five hours. It's not expensive sheet music, but it's not easy to come by either. The effort is worth it if you're preparing for a performance or just want to play something meaningful from the soundtrack, but don't expect it to be a quick download and play situation.