It may come as a surprise to most musicians that working with sheet music in digital formats can actually offer faster and more effective methods of learning over their paper counterparts. When the physical bulk of paper becomes irrelevant and editing becomes as flexible as email (as opposed to rubber erasers and typewriter whiteout!), the process of learning music takes on an incredibly creative and interactive dimension that not only lends speed, but more importantly, pedagogical depth to increase the quality of musical retention.

Here are three pedagogical techniques that work particularly well for musicians using digital scores:

1. Color

If you ever have the opportunity to browse the Philadelphia Orchestra library archives, you may be struck by how colorfully annotated the scores of Ormandy, Stokowski, and Rachmaninoff were. These great masters realized the power of color and how effectively they could be used to quickly highlight the major portions of the music, especially when rehearsal time was of the essence. Neurological studies have shown that the use of color can increase both the speed and the retention rate of information dramatically.

Thanks to digital tools like MusicReader, today's musicians can use bright colors to freely annotate, highlight, and erase their ink markings in their music without the inflexible permanance of color ink on paper.

2. Cutouts

Marking music with pencil or color ink is just one way of focusing attention on specific areas of the music. Again, referring back to brain studies, scientists have shown that contrary to popular belief, humans are NOT wired to "multi-task" - we learn and work most effectively when we focus on one thing at a time. When surrounding distractions can be eliminated or minimized, the effectiveness of learning exponentially increases.

One method for focusing on problem areas in music is to digitally "cut out" portions of the score. Windows Vista users can use either a Snipping tool, or for XP users, a similar program called "Snippy". For Mac users, a free option is the screen clipping program Jing (also works for Windows users). Pasting these virtual cutouts into a blank document page can eliminate surrounding musical "distractions" and make it much easier to focus on the particular musical challenges.

The following video, an excerpt from the ongoing "Clair de lune from Scratch" piano lesson series, gives an example of the above two techniques in action:

3. Comparisons

Sometimes it can be a tremendous help to see how similar musical passages compare side by side and note the points where they differ. In this video excerpt, we see a simple example of how easy it is to create digital comparisons between two nearly identical phrases:

Another potential application might be the ease of comparing multiple editions, since the bulk of physical scores is virtually eliminated when working in the digital domain.