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:

1. Download this file (right-click and choose "download" or "save" if your browser doesn't offer that option at first)
2. Close all MuseScore windows
3. Start MuseScore
4. Got to Edit / Preferences Shortcuts
5. Press "Import"
6. Select & open the file you downloaded in step 1
7. 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!