Hello! This month in the Musicianship Skills Workshop, we'll be looking at the music of the Beatles and using it to explore ear training and theory and the connections between the two. It's going to be a blast, so if you've been looking for an excuse to join us, this is it! Become a gold level member to participate in this and all my other resources - there's more than enough material to keep you busy eight days a week if you like, or, if it's all too much, then I want to tell you that we can work it out (and I'll stop with the Beatles song references now).

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, it's time for our first-Wednesday Ask Me Anything session. Come prepared with your questions, and if I'll need to see your score in order to answer, post it to the Conversation space.

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 there were an award for "least-known feature" in MuseScore, a strong contender would be the "note anchored line". You won't find it on the Lines palette; only in the Add / Lines menu. And even if you stumbled on it there, your first attempts to use it might have failed. To use this, first select exactly two notes (e.g., click one, Ctrl+click or Cmd+click the other), then use Add / Lines / Note Anchored Line. You'll get a line connecting the centers of the notes by default:

You can then select the line and adjust the handles to position it more to your liking.

Note that this isn't intended for glissando; there is a separate element for that on the Arpeggios and Glissandi palette. This is just for cases where you want to visually connect notes for other reasons, such as to show when a single logical voice in a composition crosses from one staff to another, etc.

Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, I'll be looking at some Beatles music from the Musicianship Skills Workshop, and also some of your submissions.

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

One of the songs we're discussing in the Musicianship Skills Workshop is You Won't See Me, composed primarily by Paul McCartney. One of the msot noteworthy musical devices in that song is one I also hear on Chicago's Saturday in the Park (by Robert Lamm). The connection was so striking to me right off the bat, it seemed unlikely to be an accident, especially when I thought about some other connections between the songs that I started hearing, and a little Internet research tells me my suspicions are probably correct.

Just by listening to the recordings, can you guess what I mean? Also, it seems likely there are examples of this going much farther back - can anyone think of examples? Let me know your thoughts in the Share & Discuss space in the community!