This edition is the result of Harald Vogel's many years of practice as an organist and musicologist. The music text is based on a reevaluation of 17th- and 18th-century manuscripts containing the free organ and keyboard works by Buxtehude. They originated during a transitional phase between the traditional letter tablature and the staff notation still in use today. Since many works have survived only in transcriptions for staff notation, the editor was confronted with a high error rate, which he carefully analyzes in the "Einzelanmerkungen."

During the preparation of the edition, the editor always kept sight of the performance practice, but still, the image of the sources is never distorted (e.g. by superfluous rests, beaming not conforming to the sources, and the unhistorical adjustment of time signatures) and stays very close to the compositional notation, the letter tablature. The flexible use of three staves and the differentiated distribution of the voices on the staves allow for an approximation in reading conventions of historical notation with its resulting information about hand division.