MUSESCORE: Writing music
Nick Peers reveals how to turn your musical ditties into full-blown professional scores with the help of this fabulous free tool.
Nick Peers reveals how to turn your musical ditties into full-blown, professional scores with the help of this fabulous free tool and any old MIDI keyboard.
If you’re a musician who wants to create your own music score, then you’ll know how painstaking, complicated and expensive it can be to produce notation by hand. Thankfully, Linux is blessed with several music notation tools, and one of the best is – of course – both free and open source.
Musescore 3 combines all the functionality you need to build simple or complex scores from scratch, with a customisable user interface that doesn’t require a degree in music to understand. It’s intuitively laid out, and you can build your score using a combination of drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts and – optionally of course – your MIDI keyboard. You can also import scores from a wide range of sources – including the standard Musicxml format and even some PDFS.
Music to my ears
The version of Musescore available in the Ubuntu 18.04 repos is the older version 2 release – visit https:// Musescore.org/en/download to obtain the latest version, either as a standalone Appimage or to read distro-specific instructions. In Ubuntu 18.04, open the terminal and issue the following commands:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mscore-ubuntu/ mscore3-stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install Musescore 3
Once done, launch Musescore and you’ll be run through a setup wizard – select a language and keyboard layout and then choose between the Basic and Advanced workspace. Leave Basic selected for now and click Next – we’ll cover workspaces in more detail later. You’ll be given the option of watching some product tours – these will appear when you select certain parts of the user interface for the first time – and then Musescore will open proper to its Start Centre.
This starts out rather bare: click ‘Create New Score…’ to get started, then follow the step-by-step guide to building the basic blocks of your first composition. Take the time to explore the different palettes, which provide you with pretty much everything you need to add to your piece, from Dynamics (ranging from ‘ppp’ through ‘mf’ all the way to ‘fff’) to Articulations, containing everything from staccato notes to trills.
You can add extra text elements via the Add>text submenu. Some of these replicate options found under Palettes>text. Select ‘System Text’ to insert a text box above the music when you can record the piece’s tempo using the usual terms such as Moderato or Allegro.
Add guitar parts
The Add>text menu is also where you go to include chord symbols in your notations: select the note or rest where you’d like the chord to be placed, then choose Add>text >Chordsymbol to create the box. Now manually type the root note plus the ‘#’ symbol to make it a sharp, or type ‘b’ to make it a flat. Other additions include ‘##’ and ‘bb’, plus ‘natural’ to specify it’s a natural. Once done, click away from the box and it will be formatted correctly.
Musescore also supports other forms of guitar parts, including tablature – just add these via the Edit>instruments dialog. If you can’t find a tablature option for your specific instrument, just add the classical guitar option, then click the ‘Stave type’ drop-down menu and choose the type closest to your instrument. Entering notes is a little trickier on tablature – once you’ve set the note length, position the cursor over the desired string (or use the up and down keys), then type the fret mark number from 0-9 (or above – just type 1+0 for 10, and so on).
Note too speedy
Entering notes by hand can be slow and painstaking – even if you start making use of keyboard shortcuts (C, D, E and so on). If you use these shortcuts you’ll also need to be able to move notes up and down octaves as required: use Ctrl+up/down arrows after inputting the note to do this. If you have access to a MIDI keyboard, use that to input notes far more quickly than via the mouse or your PC’S keys – the boxout reveals how to set it up and get things working.
Whether or not you opt for a MIDI keyboard, there are still other keyboard shortcuts you should learn to help speed up data entry. Start by familiarising yourself with the keys required to change the length of the note before entering it, from 1 for a (deep breath) hemidemisemiquaver to 7 for a semibreve. Want to convert the last note to a dotted one? Press Shift+q/w to decrease/increase its duration by a half – or single dot – respectively. Most passages of music also contain numerous rests – press 0 (zero) to input a rest of the currently selected note length.
One way to familiarise yourself with how Musescore works is to take an existing piece of music and input it into the program to learn the ropes – the top tip box reveals several online sources of Musescore-compatible music files you could download and print out, or simply dust down one of your music books. Thanks to universal undo – using the ubiquitous Ctrl+z – you can experiment with different passages and learn how various elements work.
What else can you do to speed up note entry? If you come across a passage that’s similar or identical to something you’ve already entered, press [N] to disable Note Entry mode, then select the first bar in your chosen selection by clicking on it so it’s surrounded by a blue box. Next, hold [Shift] and click on the last bar or measure in your selection, then press Ctrl+c. Select the target bar where you wish to paste your repeated sequence and press Ctrl+v.
If the passage is identical, you’re done; if not you can make manual changes or try some of Musescore’s other tools, such as re-pitch (click the down arrow next to the Note Entry button, then choose ‘Re-pitch’). When selected, position the cursor at the start of the sequence, then play the replacement notes – you’ll see the notes change, but the length of each not is identical to the one it replaces.
My music muse
Musescore makes it easy to listen back to your compositions using the playback controls on the main toolbar. Click the |< button to place the play marker at the beginning of your piece, then hit Play to listen to it. You’ll also see controls for playing in a loop, respecting repeat markers and having the score pan automatically as its played so you can pinpoint where errors may occur. For additional playback controls, including the ability to change the tempo and configure a metronome to accompany playback, select ‘View>play Panel’. If you don’t like the instrument that’s been selected for playback – for example, the default grand piano for any piano-based pieces – then check out the boxout on using Musescore’s Mixer.
If – or perhaps when – you discover mistakes after you’ve transcribed your music, you can edit individual notes easily: make sure note input is disabled, then roll your mouse over the offending note, clicking and dragging it to the correct pitch. Remove unwanted items – such as staccato notes – by right-clicking the item
and selecting Delete.
You can – if you wish – even transpose your song to make it higher or lower than currently written – all without having to tear things up and start again from scratch (perfect if you’re preparing music for a vocal performance only to discover it doesn’t suit your vocalist’s range, for example). You can change specific parts by selecting them, but in most cases you’ll want to change the entire song: press Ctrl+a to ensure all of it is selected, then choose Tools>transpose.
Two broad types of transposition are available: chromatic or diatonic. The former is best for most people. Chromatic offers two options: by key, or by interval. Use the ‘By Key’ option to choose one of closest, up or down, then pick your target key using the drop-down menu. ‘By Interval’ is for those who know their minor seconds, major thirds and so on.
Customise your workspace
Musescore divides its tools in what are known as workspaces. These can be undocked from the main window (click the tiny button next to the close button) and dragged anywhere on your desktop. The Palettes workspace is the only one shown by default, but others can be summoned from the View menu. These include the Master Palette, which contains many more tools than those shown on the basic Palettes workspace, and Inspector, which allows you to fine-tune the currently selected note or object.
As your composition grows, select View>navigator to move around your document – handy at high levels of magnification or with multi-page scores. View>timeline provides a detailed overview of key aspects, such as time and key signatures. If your piece features lots of changes, this can help you see where they occur.
There’s also a Synthesiser option in addition to the Mixer panel – this is a separate floating window and comes in useful if you import your own instrument sounds for any reason. Two synthesisers are provided – Fluid, for natively supported Soundfont (SF2/SF3) libraries, and Zerberus for SFZ sound sample libraries. Visit https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/ soundfonts-and-sfz-files for a detailed guide and additional Soundfonts. Double-click a file to install it, then use the Fluid tab to load the sound into Musescore for use in your compositions. You can also find Master Effects, Tuning (which is set to concert pitch – or 440Hz – by default) and Dynamics tabs for fine-tuning your instruments.
Want to hide certain parts of your score for clarity while adding new elements? Choose View>selection Filter, then untick the elements you don’t need to see. There’s also a Piano Keyboard panel for selecting notes on-screen with your mouse, plus a Score Comparison Tool for comparing two scores (or versions of the same score) for differences.
Manage workspaces
All these elements clip into place around the main pane that shows your notation and can be resized and repositioned as required. You can even set up multiple custom workspaces containing different elements, depending on what you’re currently doing.
While it’s possible to set these up via the View>workspaces menu, a quicker (and more stable) method is to use the controls at the bottom of the Palette pane. Click ‘+’ next to the current workspace, give it a suitably descriptive name, tick the elements (toolbars, menu bar, GUI preferences and components) you wish to include in it, and finally click Save. You’ll switch to the new workspace – use the workspace drop-down menu to switch between them.
Changes you make to this workspace on are automatically recorded, so you can switch to another workspace and back again without having to save your current layout first.
Once your composition is complete, what can you do with it then? Musescore offers a wide range of options for exporting it, all accessible via the File>export menu. There’s Musescore’s own format of course, along with widely supported Musicxml for porting it to other music notation programs.
You can export it as a PDF for people to open and print to paper – scores are all formatted A4. Other options include a MID file for playing through your Midicompatible equipment, or a range of audio files, built using the instruments you select using the Mixer.