This newsletter is for Pueblo musicians - to keep us all connected and informed about opportunities.
A little barbershop
Hello! Lots going on but no news to share to regarding MuseScore 4, so let's right to business...
MuseScore Café
This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we continue our third-Wednesday "score of the month" series by taking an orchestral piece I created in Finale years ago and looking at how to import it into MuseScore.
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
If you have a score that was created in another program, you have a few choices for importing the music into MuseScore.
By far the most useful format for exchanging scores between notation programs is MusicXML. You can generally expect most information to come through very well. MIDI is an extremely distant second - a ton of information will usually be lost, and it will usually be very difficult to reconstruct it (often more difficult than reentering the music by hand).
Of course, either of those options assumes you still have access to the program used to create the file. Windows users can use the free Finale Notepad to convert Finale files to MusicXML, and sometimes demo versions of programs might be able to export MusicXML as well, although often this feature is disabled.
There are also a few programs whose native format MuseScore can read directly, at least in part. These include GuitarPro and Capella, with experimental support for Overture and Band-in-a-Box as well.
All of these choices are available directly from File / Open.
Music Master Class
This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we'll check out some work done as part of my music courses - the start of a fugue by Brian Collins and a chorale harmonization by Hadrien Grasland.
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
As a demonstration in this week's Musicianship Skills Workshop, I created a barbershop arrangement of - what else - Mary Had Little Lamb. I only did the first four bars for the demonstration, but later I decided to go ahead and complete a verse. I can't guarantee I didn't break any barbershop rules, but it sounds good to me. Here it is:
You can listen on musescore.com: https://musescore.com/user/2975/scores/8834319
If you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to join us as a Gold Level Member so you can get all the lessons for the workshop!
Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore
This newsletter is for Pueblo musicians - to keep us all connected and informed about opportunities.
Hello! This week in the Musicianship Workshop, we start creating compositions based on a model provided by an existing work of our choice. This project will be our focus for the remainder of the month. This ongoing workshop is becoming a pretty exciting thing, and people are learning a lot and enjoying the process. We'd love to have you as a part of it as well! If you'd like to join us, please become a Gold-level member of the Outside Shore Music community, and then head to the workshop to...
Hello! As I mentioned last week, I'm making some changes to how subscriptions work in the Outside Shore Music community. Those of you who have accounts on the site but no active subscriptions should already have received a message from me regarding this. Those of you with active subscriptions are not affected. For those of you who don't have accounts on the site already, I'd still love to have you join us, and I'll send out some more info later. This week in the Musicianship Workshop space,...
Hello! As September gives way to October and the leaves start changing here in the Northern hemisphere (and start appearing in the Southern), there are a few changes here in the world of Outside Shore Music also that I'd like to let you know about. First, as I have indicated recently, I have now enabled a new "gamification" feature for the Outside Shore Music community site. The idea is to incentivize engagement - and yes, I know how buzzwordy that sounds, but it's an accurate description....