Hello! In case you haven't heard, MuseScore 4.0.1 is released, with fixes to the most critical of the bugs reported thus far. For more information, see the announcement I posted to the community site. For those of you enrolled in Mastering MuseScore 4, I have posted a small project to work on that I will follow up on in the MuseScore Café this week.

I also encourage everyone to check out the ear training project I posted last week. It's by no means easy, but you can tackle just a piece of it if you like, and together we'll all learn where we might still need help. We'll discuss this more during this week's Music Master Class.

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we continue our third-Wednesday "score of the month" series with the simple piano piece I used as a demo in my Mastering MuseScore 4 course.

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 markings to your score, MuseScore positions them according to various style settings and other built-in defaults. For elements like trills that MuseScore normally places above the staff, you can easily flip them below using the keyboard shortcut "X" or with the "Flip direction" button on the main toolbar:
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The converse is true, of course, for elements like dynamics that are placed below the staff by default.
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You can also set the default position for most elements using settings in the Format / Style:
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Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we look at a selection of recently submitted music, including submissions for the ear training project I discussed last week.

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

The ear training project I posted contains a number of modulations - individual sections of the piece in different keys. For the most part the modulations are pretty typical, moving through keys that are only one step removed from the original on the circle of fifths. For example, starting from G, the most closely related keys are C and D, plus their relative minors A minor and B minor. However, this piece does something that is at least a little unusual by the standards of earlier centuries - it also moves to keys that are a little more distantly related. This is hardly unique, but it did cause my ears to take notice, as it seemed at first a little out of place for the style. Check out the recording and listen for yourself, and see if you can hear when this happens!