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!
I want to be a sideman
Hello! The subject line of this issue is the title of a song by the late great Dave Frishberg, celebrating the joys of being an accompanist or otherwise playing a supporting role in a band. Like many of his songs, it's funny but insightful, and full of clever rhymes ("I want to be a sideman / just a highly qualified man"). It came to mind as I thought about my focus on accompaniment this week. Check it out, and I hope it brings a smile to your face!
MuseScore Café
This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we look at various instruments that you can write for and what you need to know about using them. It will be some MuseScore how-to combined with a mini-lesson in orchestration!
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
When you add instruments to your score in MuseScore - either when first creating your score via File / New, or later via Edit / Instruments - by default MuseScore only shows you a list of "common" instruments, to avoid overwhelming you with too many options. So you might not realize there are actually hundreds more instruments available. If you click the dropdown at the top of the dialog where it normally says "Common", you'll see you can change to any of a variety of genres to see instruments used in those worlds, or "All instruments" to see everything:
There is also a convenient search box to let you quickly find all different variants of recorder, sackbut, ukulele, or whatever!
Music Master Class
This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, I plan to focus on accompaniment - the things going on underneath the main melody of a composition. As usual, I'll be looking at music submitted by members, while also referencing possible models in the literature.
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
My choice to focus on accompaniment this week was motivated in part by a number of posts I've seen lately in the Community, the MuseScore forum, and elsewhere. In particular, check out this post by Jim Ivy (whose arrangement of the Irving Berlin tune I didn't get to last week, but I hope to look at this time):
Jim shows some specific piano accompaniment patterns common in early 20th century sheet music arrangements. It would be possible to expand on that, and also to construct similar "cheat sheets" for other genres. It could be an interesting project to collect examples! I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments to his post, or start a new one to discuss other genres.
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! 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....
Hello! Thanks for bearing with me over the past week as I was setting up my new studio. While I still have work to do, we should be back to business as usual with respect to my live events.Meanwhile, this week in Practical Counterpoint, we're wrapping up our initial exploration of writing for three or more voices, and in Music Master Class we'll be looking at your projects on this topic. Mastering MuseScore If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music...