My name is Marc Sabatella, and I am the founder of Outside Shore Music - a pioneer of online music education since the dawn of the web. As the creator of Mastering MuseScore, A Jazz Improvisation Primer, and other resources, I have dedicated most of my life to helping as many musicians as I can. Subscribe to my free newsletter for MuseScore tips, theory insights, and more information on how to create your best music!
Getting ready for the year to come
Hello! I hope everyone is enjoying some relaxed time between the Christmas/Hanukkah holiday and the new year. As I mentioned before, I'm taking these last two weeks of December off from my regular weekly live events and will return in January. I will still be present in the community, so by all means, continue to share music, ask questions, and give each other feedback!
I'll also be restarting the Musicianship Skills and Music Engraving workshops in January, but I may be tweaking the format a bit more to try to serve you better. Stay tuned!
MuseScore Café
Off this week
Tip of the Week
This week's tip is very specific, for those of you who have numeric keypads, have downloaded MuseScore 4, and are finding the keypad not working for note input. As was the case with MuseScore 3, these keypads work for some people but not others. Some people who had problems in 3 are finding them fixed in 4, but unfortunately the reverse is true also. If you are having trouble getting your numeric keypad working, there is a simple workaround:
- Download this file (right-click and choose "download" or "save" if your browser doesn't offer that option at first)
- Close all MuseScore windows
- Start MuseScore
- Got to Edit / Preferences Shortcuts
- Press "Import"
- Select & open the file you downloaded in step 1
- Close MuseScore
From then on, the keypad should work normally. Hopefully a fix is found so that it works "out of the box: for more people in the future.
Music Master Class
Off this week
In Theory
I see a lot of questions from a lot of people on various music theory forums, and one thing quickly becomes clear: there is a lot of information about music theory out there, and a lot of that ends up confusing people more than it helps. But even if someone is confused by some particular article or video they saw online, it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with that resource - or with the person who is confused by it. It may just mean this resource is using terminology differently from some other resource, or it might mean it requires you to have already learned some other concept first, or it might only apply to some specific type of music.
I don't have solutions to the more general problems here, but I do want to help people as I can. This is one of the guiding principles behind my Musicianship Skills Workshop - to give people the sort of background and context to see the big picture when learning about theory from others.
So I will be encouraging people over the coming weeks to let me know more about the "holes" they want to see me filling for them. Something to be thinking about as we head into the new year!
Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore
by Marc Sabatella
My name is Marc Sabatella, and I am the founder of Outside Shore Music - a pioneer of online music education since the dawn of the web. As the creator of Mastering MuseScore, A Jazz Improvisation Primer, and other resources, I have dedicated most of my life to helping as many musicians as I can. Subscribe to my free newsletter for MuseScore tips, theory insights, and more information on how to create your best music!
Hello, hello! This week in Practical Counterpoint, we begin the section on imitation, so you can look forward to hearing much about that. This week I also am starting the ball rolling towards crowd-sourcing a library of high-quality scores in MuseScore format. We'll discuss this during Wednesday's MuseScore Café, and hopefully return to the subject in the weeks ahead. My goal is to eventually have a reliable way of finding the "best" MuseScore editions of any given piece for further study....
Hello! Thanks for bearing with me over the past week as I was setting up my new studio. While I still have work to do, we should be back to business as usual with respect to my live events.Meanwhile, this week in Practical Counterpoint, we're wrapping up our initial exploration of writing for three or more voices, and in Music Master Class we'll be looking at your projects on this topic. Mastering MuseScore If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music...
Hello! I wanted to give you a heads up that I am in the process of setting up a new studio, so bear with me if there are any glitches in my live events this week.Meanwhile, this week in the Practical Counterpoint course, we're continuing to expand to three parts and beyond. I'll be posting some new things for us to work on shortly. Mastering MuseScore If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music notation software, join our community with a Mastering...