The game here is to make a collection of images of musical symbols, and one
of the easiest ways to do that is to scan pieces of music that have pleasing
symbols. Taking pages in at 300 dpi gives pretty big symbols that are easy to
mark, copy, paste and push around in programs like MS paint, MS photo editor and
Adobe photoshop.
Just to get a little practice with it, a piece we all like to play has been
scanned here.
The changes that have been made so
far include cleaning it up to make it more readable and (since I am the
accordion hacker) moving the key indicators (D, G, A7, etc.) from below the
staves to above them. Of course it's crude, but the printed output isn't all
that bad,
and I expect that some of our guitarists and other keyboard players will prefer
this over the original. Further plans for this include adding one or more
staves with hints about what might go well with what the melody instruments
are doing - maybe even how, when and where to slap the dumbek or stomp the feet.
Another way to proceed is to dump the contents of any musical symbol font into
an html document. Then grab it with alt-PrintScrn, suck it into a photo editor
and save it as a .gif or a .jpeg. (For present purposes, I prefer a .gif because
the background can be changed from white to transparent, and that
means the images can be summoned in arbitrary order.)
Here, for example
is the contents of musicalsymbols.ttf. This appears to be a free font by an
unknown author. Lots of references to it can be found by googling musical
symbols font.
And again, if the browser you use hates symbol-fonts, it may be possible to fix
that as follows: