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Outside Shore Music / Mastering MuseScore

On The Same Page

Published over 2 years ago • 2 min read

Hello! I'm trying something kind of new in the MuseScore Café (I did something similar once very early on). Check it out and let me know what you think - I may end up making this a regular feature!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, follow along as I take a page of existing music and enter it into MuseScore in real time, explaining the what, how, and why of everything I do along the way. See how I work efficiently to get things looking and sounding their best!

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 wish to add fingering to a just a few notes in a score, the Fingering palette is what you need. Do be sure to add the correct type of fingering though - piano vs. guitar - to get the proper layout.

But when adding fingering to many notes, skip the palette. Well, use it to add one fingering of the correct type. But then double-click it to put it in edit mode, and press Space. You'll see the cursor move on to the next note, and you can type the desired fingering. Then Space again to move to the next note. Just like entering lyrics or chord symbols, you can go as fast as you can type. We added this capability a couple of years back but it's a bit under the radar, so I thought I'd let you clue you in! Of course, if you've worked through my flagship Mastering MuseScore: Complete Online Course, you knew about this already :-)

screenshot of fingering being added

Music Master Class

This week I will be looking at some really interesting pieces by Joanne and Colleen and seeing what comes up in discussion!

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

A couple of weeks ago in the Music Master Class, I focused on what I characterized as the half dozen or so core principles to know about harmony, roughly in order of importance:

  1. diatonic chords and function
  2. secondary dominants
  3. diminished approach chords
  4. borrowed chords
  5. augmented sixth chords / tritone substitutions
  6. Neapolitans

I then proceeded to find examples of these in all the music we looked at that day.

You can analyze a ton of existing music, and write a ton of your own, with just those tools. The first alone is worth something already, and the first two together really account for most folk musics. Add 3 & 4 and you have most popular music of the last century; add 5 and you can deal with most jazz.

To learn much more about these concepts, see my Harmony and Chord Progressions course. There are lots of other resources out there where you can learn more about these as well, of course. But as people who have taken my harmony course will tell you, my presentation of this material really gets to the heart of the matter in very practical ways. If you've ever tried to study music theory but struggled to make use of it, give my harmony course a shot!

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!

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