MuseScore Curriculum

A thread for questions about the free music notation program MuseScore, known to be used on occasion by ilxors Tim E, lathamgreen and Steve G-berg.

Such as, if you notate something for an octave transposing instrument like bass or guitar, is there an easy way to get it to play back in that octave. I tried changing to one of the (somewhat cheesy) guitar sounds and it seemed to still play in concert pitch. Oh, wait maybe I need to turn off Concert Pitch.

There seems to be a smartphone app, but only for playback.

Okay, figured out how to add lots of guitar notation, on the staff at least , haven't tried tab yet. Most of it is pretty easy, entering fingerings seems to be kind of a pain though.

I haven't used musescore, but I have done a lot of midi stuff with soundfonts which is essentially the basis of musescore's sounds; for learning how to notate properly on staves I've been using Notion for iOS which has a really nice sound library and in fact does have a really nice guitar notation mode. I got a grounding in notation playing alto sax in grades two through ten but then I veered off into guitar and 4 track land. Getting heavily into classical music later on, plus having my guitar playing hindered by injury, made me want/need to get back under the hood

Ah, I see. Need to select the treble clef with the 8 under it.

Thanks, Jon. May investigate that in the near future.

This guy doesn't like the guitar sounds much either: https://musescore.org/en/node/76651

Getting a little better at this, used it a bunch the past two weekends. Today I learned to use Voices to have notes of different duration on the same staff and the Repeat ("R") operation to copy a note or chord and paste immediately afterward. One little issue, can't get a tie to go through a repeat. Also learned by accident that Shift-letter where letter is not a note but is the first letter of a submenu in the Master Palette will bring up Palette pointing to the right place.

One of the trickiest things to get a handle on is what can and can't be done depending on whether you are in Note Input Mode or not.

Guess generally you click on a note when not in Note Entry mode to anchor other things there such as (on a Mac)

• Command-K to enter Chord Symbols
• Command-L to enter Lyrics

Hm, might look into this Notion for iOS that Jon not Jon recommends as well.

Okay, so I tried the Notion App for iPhone. Like the fretboard input and the fact that it generates tablature, and the guitar playback sound is indeed better. But I found using it a little challenging on the small iPhone screen: there seems to be some bug, perhaps associated with the Select function, and when I exported to xml and then imported to MuseScore it turned out a little bit messy. Some of this has to do with the way MuseScore handles the transposing by using the treble clef with an 8 under it. In any case my MuseScore skills have gotten better and using a linked tab staff there is pretty easy as well. Read good things about the Notion desktop app, but probably not going to pony up any time soon and look forward to MuseScore 3.

The select function is very fussy, probably the most annoying part of the notion iOS experience for me. I wouldn't call it buggy but it can take me a bit to get the group of notes I want highlighted.

Are you using on iPhone or iPad?

Both. Mostly phone, but it syncs all projects between the two so sometimes I pick up something on the iPad for a bit.

I haven't fucked with the guitar tablature side of things much though, mostly writing inept orchestral stuff (though often using the fretboard UI to make note choices)

Also, one of the other funny things about the Select is that it is both the Select itself and a way to get to a subpallete. Still haven't figured out how to distinguish how to get the one or the other.

Finally, kind of annoying that I can only read the help pdf from within the app, can't really find one in to read outside the app.

Okay, got better at some stuff over the weekend, but adding Fretboard Diagrams from the default palette and then altering is tedious. Will need to customize.

For reference:
http://www.georgehess.net/notation-wars/

http://www.sibeliusblog.com/news/behind-the-scenes-with-dorico-musescore-and-a-finale-font-tool/

Entering fingerings and barre indications still the most tedious aspect.

Have you considered going the fully masochistic route and trying Lilypond?

Ha, no, what is that?

It's a score typesetting system that uses plain text markup and was I think originally based on some music packages for TeX, I tried it out a little and it's not that bad for typing in notes, at least.

Have you tried music21? It has a tinynotation mode that instantly generates the xml for notes.

Back to MuseScore. Note input page for handy reference:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/note-input

Upgraded to 2.1 recently. Still resisting the siren song of Sibelius.

while sibelius and finale are great for music notation, i think logic pro x works really well, as well, especially if you're bringing in non-classical instruments into the mix and actually recording

Native support for Roman numeral analysis and Nashville notation

Saw the video on that, not sure how much I will use, but some other workflow improvements look pretty sweet

Keep hearing about Dorico these days.

Just starting using again after a break. Lots of improvements in the latest edition,