Some music is written badly and it is not because the quality of the music is particularly bad. I am not imposing my personal opinion here, it just that some music is not written well. Actually it is more accurate to state that some music is transcribed really badly.
If you have every heard a piece of music that would fit into the modern or popular genre, what you have heard on the radio or online and that music has inspired you to learn, it is obviously authentic to the composer’s original ideas. When you buy a copy of the printed music, it is not what the composer has originally written. Often it is someone else listening to that music and then writing down what they hear, that ends up being the copy of music that you buy.
I don’t know whether the system has improved over the years, but going back to the 80’s and 90’s the system was that when a new song was days before it was released, someone was hired by the record company to transcribe the music and they were typically given 36 – 48 hours to do so. This is not a great deal of time because the song would be unfamiliar as it had not even been released and it takes time to become familiar with all the elements. Just think about how many times do you need to hear a song before you can hum the melody. Well this is just the first part of the transcribing process. There is also a matter of getting the timing and notes correct, which can be quite the task.
I don’t know if things have changed in the last twenty odd years, but I imagine it has not, simply because if new music, especially by the big artists, was leaked before the release date, then that could mean reduced revenue for the record company. It is understandable why record companies deal with obtaining the print music in this manner (or at least, the way they used to).
So the point of explaining all of this is that with modern music at least, the print music is frequently not very good, which means it is not always your playing that maybe sounds poor, but it is the music itself.
This then has the implication of maybe trying to buy another transcription of the music, which is certainly an option. The other thing that you could do is to experiment with the music that you do have and change it. You could add extra notes, add chords to add a richness to the music or tweak the timing. Really you could do whatever you felt like.
What you could do before you ever buy any print music, is to look online and compare what is available. What some of you may not realize is that a number of places that sell print music online will actually provide you with an excerpt of the music you want to buy. It should be enough to give you a feel as to whether it is worthwhile to pay for the complete copy.
So, if you have got a copy of a piece of music that sounds terrible, there are indeed options to get this resolved.