My name is Marc Sabatella, and I am the founder of Outside Shore Music - a pioneer of online music education since the dawn of the web. As the creator of Mastering MuseScore, A Jazz Improvisation Primer, and other resources, I have dedicated most of my life to helping as many musicians as I can. Subscribe to my free newsletter for MuseScore tips, theory insights, and more information on how to create your best music!
A little barbershop
Hello! Lots going on but no news to share to regarding MuseScore 4, so let's right to business...
MuseScore Café
This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we continue our third-Wednesday "score of the month" series by taking an orchestral piece I created in Finale years ago and looking at how to import it into MuseScore.
The free MuseScore Café is live on Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.
Tip of the Week
If you have a score that was created in another program, you have a few choices for importing the music into MuseScore.
By far the most useful format for exchanging scores between notation programs is MusicXML. You can generally expect most information to come through very well. MIDI is an extremely distant second - a ton of information will usually be lost, and it will usually be very difficult to reconstruct it (often more difficult than reentering the music by hand).
Of course, either of those options assumes you still have access to the program used to create the file. Windows users can use the free Finale Notepad to convert Finale files to MusicXML, and sometimes demo versions of programs might be able to export MusicXML as well, although often this feature is disabled.
There are also a few programs whose native format MuseScore can read directly, at least in part. These include GuitarPro and Capella, with experimental support for Overture and Band-in-a-Box as well.
All of these choices are available directly from File / Open.
Music Master Class
This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we'll check out some work done as part of my music courses - the start of a fugue by Brian Collins and a chorale harmonization by Hadrien Grasland.
The free Music Master Class is live on Thursday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.
In Theory
As a demonstration in this week's Musicianship Skills Workshop, I created a barbershop arrangement of - what else - Mary Had Little Lamb. I only did the first four bars for the demonstration, but later I decided to go ahead and complete a verse. I can't guarantee I didn't break any barbershop rules, but it sounds good to me. Here it is:
You can listen on musescore.com: https://musescore.com/user/2975/scores/8834319
If you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to join us as a Gold Level Member so you can get all the lessons for the workshop!
Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore
by Marc Sabatella
My name is Marc Sabatella, and I am the founder of Outside Shore Music - a pioneer of online music education since the dawn of the web. As the creator of Mastering MuseScore, A Jazz Improvisation Primer, and other resources, I have dedicated most of my life to helping as many musicians as I can. Subscribe to my free newsletter for MuseScore tips, theory insights, and more information on how to create your best music!
Hello! This week we should see an update to MuseScore - now being rebranded as MuseScore Studio to help differentiate the notation software from the website and mobile apps. MuseScore Studio 4.3 adds a few interesting features and fixes many bugs, and I will be highlighting this release in the MuseScore Café. BTW, the mobile apps also just got an update, finally (!) supporting MuseScore 4 files.I’m also launching a second Office Hours session at a somewhat later time, to try to accommodate...
Hello! Thanks for all the great discussion in last week's MuseScore Café about ideas for building a high-quality score library. I'm still not exactly sure how we will proceed but stay tuned for more on this topic, as there definitely seems to be interest in the topic! This week in Practical Counterpoint, we continue our work on imitation. Music Master Class will feature some really interesting short "inventions" created by students in the course! Mastering MuseScore If you are interested in...
Hello, hello! This week in Practical Counterpoint, we begin the section on imitation, so you can look forward to hearing much about that. This week I also am starting the ball rolling towards crowd-sourcing a library of high-quality scores in MuseScore format. We'll discuss this during Wednesday's MuseScore Café, and hopefully return to the subject in the weeks ahead. My goal is to eventually have a reliable way of finding the "best" MuseScore editions of any given piece for further study....