So weird question, but I was wondering if there is piano sheet music for any of the songs on MST3K? I’m thinking in particular of the carol from Santa Claus or “Gypsy Moon” from Crash of the Moons. I’m just learning to play piano, and I thought, why not see?
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I have not seen any such things but they wouldn’t be hard to put together.
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There was something kind of like that in the MST3K comic book:
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I believe the chords are:
D B7 Em A7
D B7 Em A7
G Gb A Ab
A
Repeated over and over. For a beginner, I’d probably just play the D-B-E-A with the left hand, probably B-Bb-A-Ab for the “Gyp-gyp-gypsy moon” part, and then in the right play the melody. When you get a little more comfortable you can play sixths in the right hand, or arpeggiate, and in the left do a walking bass.
(I can’t really claim to be a beginning piano player but it’s not my instrument, and that’s how I’d approach it.)
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Thanks! Do you have any advice on the carol from Santa Claus? I’m sure it’s simple, but I don’t have the knowledge to put it together.
I appreciate the help! When I say beginner, I mean I’m just on lesson two where I learn how to use my left hand. I think we’ll get to chords once I’ve learned how to play with both hands at once. 
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This one?
One note in each hand is all you need.
I threw this together in this thing called flat.io which I discovered about 10 minutes ago. I transposed the song to C, since key signatures can be intimidating when you’re starting out, and I squared-out the rhythm, because things you can sing easily without thinking a thing of it can also look intimidating in print (since they come out as dotted eighth notes and sixteenth notes, etc).
I can share this, apparently, too, if anyone wants to enhance it. It’d be kind of cool to evolve this with more and more flourishes so it could go from a “grade 1” type thing to…IDK, maestro level.
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Just as an aside- my dad spent hundreds of dollars collecting sheet music that he would buy on eBay. He didn’t play any instruments. He would just buy them and sometimes frame them. When he died, we tried to sell them, but they were basically worthless. What a waste of time.
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Well, he could have been buying vintage hamburgers on ebay.
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That would have been a waste of thyme.
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That’s it! Thanks!
I think enhancing it would be fun. Sort of like as I go up in skill, I go up in ability to play this carol. It seems like a fine thing for a MSTie to do.
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I don’t get that at all. I guess he liked the way sheet music looked?
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I guess he liked the artwork. That’s why he framed them after all. Also, it was only music from the 1920s and 1930s. He was convinced they were worth something though. I don’t know why when he would buy them for a few dollars each.
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We get that a lot at all the libraries I’ve worked at. “I’m sorry, but your law textbook from the 1950’s isn’t useful or valuable.”
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Nobody cares about old information. Only new, edited and approved information exists. To think otherwise is immoral wrongthink.
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I have a tremendous fondness for old sheet music myself. I picked up a stack of classical guitar music at an estate sale a few months ago. If I had bought that stuff new it would’ve cost $100s and I got the stack for, IDK, $10-$20.
There was a time when this format was the coin of the pop cultural realm. (The MP3s of a more musically literate age, to wildly overstate the case.) That time peaked around 1910, about the same time as piano ownership peaked, but up until the '70s and '80s, sheet music was a major (if not the major) source of revenue for a songwriter.
I have a sheet from my old piano teacher, who took years to find a publisher for her moon-June-spoon song (inspired by the moon landing, no less), autographed by her with “Finally!”
I like to play old scores of songs I’ve never heard to see if I get the composer’s intention at all. Of course, this gets rather harder for works composed prior to the 20th century (or you’re taking someone else’s word for it).
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That’s really cool! I love looking at the artwork on old sheet music. Until recently I really couldn’t read any of it.
That reminds me. I was reading a book about the history of New York City a few years ago, and learned about Tin Pan Alley and how sheet music was such a huge industry. That was the first time I learned about what you are saying.
Are these the old scores that you find at estate sales?
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I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or not. Comparing not wanting an old textbook to censoring ideas and information is disingenuous. I’m not talking about censoring Maus. I’m talking about having updated law information (which changes constantly) available for the patron. If they want to know about the history of law, then there are plenty of books written specifically on the subject. They don’t have to read an old, out-of-date textbook.
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Pro Tip: BP is always being sarcastic. I don’t think the Crow avatar is a coincidence. 
You can, although with the passage of time, going to any random sale is less likely just because people seem to actually play music less and those songs are slowly fading from the culture. But even now you get revivals, as with the Fallout video game bringing back a lot of the classics from that era (from what I can tell, that is: the last Fallout game I played ran on a '486 
).
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Gypsy Moon is an old vaudeville song. It’s public domain, so don’t feel like you have to buy it.
By the Light of the Silvery Moon - Digital Commons @ Connecticut College https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2340&context=sheetmusic
This is a PDF version that you can download and print. You will find many sites that sell public domain sheet music. Just do a little bit of scrolling and find it for free.
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Thanks so much!