Score Everything !

musescoreMy practice time is precious and very limited  so when I have to look for sheet music that detracts from my time spent on my music project. I had considered photo copying but invariably something would happen to the sheet music. In my case one of my dogs Kenya would be very likely to get to it. I also considered and was for a while scanning sheet music.

However , I have decided and decided again to score i.e. notate into notation software music that I think is important enough to study.

To that end I have settled on Musescore. Why ? Its for core  notation and decent playback very adept. Its also easy to use and if you Sibelius key combos they are essentially the same. The other  reason is that well, its free. I can have it installed on my Win tablet , Android tablet , PC and Mac Mini.

One of the features I like most about Musescore is that it keeps all current sheet music as tabs. Therefore I can keep all of my learning repertoire on Musescore and available in one spot right at startup of the app.

Did I already mention that there are Android and iOS apps which allow me to review music on the train. Again , my music time is precious and reviewing music scores helps quite a bit.

Is it to much work ? No, I don’t think so. Its valuable and time well spent. For me, scoring the music helps me get closer to it. It also helps albeit in an indirect way with one’s composition and arrangement skills

 

2 thoughts on “Score Everything !

  1. jon

    Sounds very good. Given I know full well the pluses and (most recently) the negatives with Sibelius I’d be interested in alternatives including the ones that might allow for Android use. I’m big on that too, given my travel time on the train is becoming key time for me to get at least something happening while I’m just standing there.

    My initial experience with Muse Score wasn’t that great but I’d be willing to try again and also with Mac and Android O/S

  2. Charles Post author

    LIke anything else there’s a learning curve , but there’s plenty of tutorial and help material, most of the keyboard combinations are very similar if not identical to Sibelius and some actions like doing system breaks to my recollection are easier. The output is quite nice. I”m sure Sib has more flexibility. The Musescore sound bank is not as good but once again its free. My take on that is that once I have a score I can drop it into GarageBand or even better Logic Pro which is itself now very affordable and tweak the sound patches to get that full experience.

    Try it out. Let me what snags you bump into , I’m not a pro but I may be able to get you past the initial acclimation period.

    Fyi, the Android app for now is just playback though.

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