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! As I write this, I'm on a flight back from Brussels. I had a great time attending the FOSDEM conference and meeting up with other MuseScore developers, designers, and users. I got to share some of the feedback I've been hearing about MuseScore 4, discuss strategies, and get some insights into what's to come. I look forward to sharing more with you over the coming months!
To unlock access to the full MuseScore course and the notation projects, see Mastering MuseScore 4.
This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we look at spacing. I'll explain how MuseScore determines the space between notes, between staves, and between systems. and l'll show you how to change the defaults or override them where needed.
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.
This month we're starting a new project based on a choral music demonstration that I created especially for the Mastering MuseScore 4 course. The piece we'll be working on is for four voices. Part of it is "chorale" style (with all voices sharing more or less the same rhythm), and part is more contrapuntal. Recreating this score yourself will give you practice in many aspects of MuseScore and will prepare you especially well for other choral works.
To participate, see the full post.
The default spacing settings in MuseScore are designed to do a good job in a wide variety of cases. However, I find a lot of people are wanting to fit more measures on a system than the defaults allow. If you are finding you need to do this only occasionally, the best way is usually to select the measures you want to force onto a single system and use the command Format / Stretch / Decrease layout stretch - shortcut "{" - one or more times to compress the spacing and hopefully allow them to fit.
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If this does not produce the desired result even after decreasing stretch several "notches", then there are simply too many notes to fit given your current settings. You will need to change one or more of them to get it to work.
For more on this topic, see the full post.
To unlock access to all music courses and projects, as well as the exclusive weekly office hours, see Gold level membership.
This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, I return to giving feedback on music submitted by members!
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.
This month we'll be working on jazz piano voicings. I will have the first exercise up later this week - once I'm back in my studio and able to record it!
To participate, watch the Musicianship Projects space for further information to come.
The most important concept to understand with respect to jazz piano voicings is that while the foundation of a chord is its root, actually playing the root is assumed to be the job of the bassist (even if this is just the pianist's left hand). The main job of the pianist is to provide the rest of the chord and/or color tones.
In jazz, all chords are normally assumed to imply color tones whether explicitly specified or not, and also to contain a seventh. The starting point in being able to build a jazz piano voicing is to know how to quickly find the third seventh of any chord given a chord symbol like Eb7b9. And it turns out to be very easy to describe how to do this.
For more on this topic, see the full post.
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, 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...
Hello! I wanted to give you a heads up that I am in the process of setting up a new studio, so bear with me if there are any glitches in my live events this week.Meanwhile, this week in the Practical Counterpoint course, we're continuing to expand to three parts and beyond. I'll be posting some new things for us to work on shortly. Mastering MuseScore If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music notation software, join our community with a Mastering...