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!
Live events are back!
Happy new year! And a special welcome to all the new people who have come on board in the past few weeks since MuseScore 4 was released. I look forward to getting to know you in the community.
Another thing I'm looking forward to is getting back into my regular weekly live events. Every Tuesday, I hold office hours for Gold level members. In addition, the MuseScore Café is on Wednesdays, and the Music Master Class on Thursdays, and in this newsletter I always let you know what we're covering - just see below.
I've been steadily adding content to my flagship course, Mastering MuseScore 4. I haven't ended the early bird special pricing, so you've got a few days left if you want to take advantage of that offer (it is applied automatically when you enroll via the link above). I am also planning some new resources I'll be telling you about soon!
MuseScore Café
This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we continue our first-Wednesday "ask me anything" series. Come with your questions, and I'll do my best to answer!
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
MuseScore 4 adds a nice new capability when it comes to instruments and staves: you can now hide individual staves of an instrument. So, if you have a bass part in a jazz chart where you have notated mostly just slashes and chord symbols, you can add a second staff to the instrument, write out a full bass line for playback purposes, then hide that staff using the eye icon on the Instruments panel.
Previous versions required you to add a separate instrument, which worked but was unnecessarily awkward in a number of ways. On the flip side, though, if you do add a separate instrument and hide it, in MuseScore 4, this also mutes it. This is part of the new more flexible parts system, where you can easily add or remove any instrument in any part at any time.
So, if you want to hide something but still hear it, hide the staff. If you want to hide and silence it, hide the full instrument.
Music Master Class
This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we'll look at some string music posted recently by Joel J Seda Orona and Jim Ivy.
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
Since I just used an example of a bass line above, I thought I would give a simple recipe for creating walking lines in jazz. Disclaimer: this is not going to win any awards for creativity, but it's useful for giving some sense of what an arrangement will sound like.
- Play the root on each chord change
- If a chord lasts for more than one measure, play a chord tone on beat one of each measure
- Approach each chord change by step
- Fill in the intervening beats by step where possible, using chromatic passing tones into chord tones as needed
- Occasional arpeggios are fine for variety
Here is a sample bass line demonstrating each of those principles:
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...