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!

Mastering MuseScore

To unlock access to the full MuseScore course and the notation projects, see Mastering MuseScore 4.

MuseScore Café - Spacing

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.

Notation Project - Choral music

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.

Tip of the Week - Fitting more measures onto a system

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.

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.

Musicianship Skills Workshop

To unlock access to all music courses and projects, as well as the exclusive weekly office hours, see Gold level membership.

Music Master Class

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.

Musicianship Project - Jazz piano voicings

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.

In Theory - Chord thirds and sevenths

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.