Free staff paper, as a PDF

I made this because I had grown tired of the staff paper you find online. Most of it is fixed — twelve staves whether you want them or not — and stamped with someone's logo across the top. Manuscript paper is not advertising space. So here is the opposite: free, blank, clean, and cut to what you are actually writing. Choose the size, the number of staves and the margins, then download a PDF and print it.

Manuscript paper is for thinking

Notation software is excellent for engraving. Manuscript paper is often better for thinking. A blank page lets musical ideas remain provisional: you can cross out, rewrite, compare, hear again, draw arrows, test a line, mark a harmonic problem or discover that the music is asking for something different.

What kind of staff paper should I use?

• Compact paper fits more staves for dense sketches.
• Standard paper is the everyday choice for writing.
• Title space adds room for a title, date, tempo, exercise number or student name.
• Instrument-label margin leaves space before each staff for instrument names and score planning.
• B4 is a larger middle format — more room than A4 without the bulk of A3.
• A3 suits larger structure, orchestration and form.

A4, B4 or A3?

A4 is best for everyday writing, printing, lessons and single exercises. B4 gives more room per page without going to full A3. A3 is useful for larger sketches, orchestration planning, form diagrams and classroom situations.

On ruling your own

A small aside. Before printed staff paper was cheap, composers simply ruled their own — often because they could not afford to buy it — with a five-nibbed pen called a rastrum. Bach drew his own staves this way, and Stravinsky went so far as to try to patent his own rolling version, the “Stravigor.” So printing your own pages is an old and honourable habit.

And yet, if you can afford it, I would gently say: buy a pad of off-white manuscript paper. It is kinder to the eyes, and simply nicer paper than anything you can run off at home. Musicians spend so much money on their instruments — thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands — and by contrast, we composers could surely spare a little on a good pad of paper.

On a blank page

There is something I have come to believe about blank paper. An empty staff is not nothing — it is the most open thing a composer owns. Five lines and a silence, waiting, with everything still possible on them. The moment a page carries a logo across the top, or a pale watermark behind the bars, it has already said something before you have; it has spent a little of the silence that was yours to spend. To my mind that is a small trespass. So I keep these pages almost severe: no name, no mark, nothing to look at but the lines you are about to disturb. A blank page is not a product. It is a room with the lights off, and you are the one who turns them on.

Yours, and free

I use these pages with my own students — for counterpoint, for first sketches, for the slow work you do away from a screen. They are free, and they will stay free. If you are working on something real and would like a pair of eyes on it, you know where to find me.

Related resources

Need a specific layout? Download counterpoint worksheet paper (paired staves for two-part exercises), four-part harmony paper (four staves per system for SATB and choral writing), songwriting paper (ruled lyric lines alongside staves), or music notebook paper (theory notes and staves side by side). Working on counterpoint? Use the cantus firmus generator. Want to place notes on screen instead of printing? Try the online staff paper.