Hello! As I write this, it's Charlie Parker's birthday. Also known as "Bird", it's hard to overstate his importance in jazz history - kind of like Bach in classical music, or the Beatles in rock. It's unfortunate, I think, that depending on musical upbringing and training, most people are probably more familiar with one of these "three B's" than the other two. There's so much to learn from all of them! We're wrapping up our look at the Beatles music this week in the Musicianship Skills Workshop, and I have a few different ideas floating in my head for next month, but rest assured, we'll be looking at Bird and Bach in due course!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, we will look at how to write for drums - general advice on use of percussion, specific suggestions on notation, and demonstrations of how to do it in MuseScore.

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

When entering drum notation in MuseScore, the default is to use voice 1 for notes played with the hands, voice 2 for notes played with the feet, as this is the most common convention used in published music. MuseScore uses these voices automatically when entering notes from the drum palette or via the keyboard shortcuts, so you don't normally have to change voices manually.

Although it works differently from pitched staves and takes a few minutes to get used to, it is actually quite efficient. A rhythm like the following is entered very easily by first focusing on the voice 1 notes for snare and toms, then going back and adding the bass drum:

Much more about drum notation in Mastering MuseScore: Complete Online Course!

Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we'll take a look music by Jim Ivy and talk just a little more about Beatles music.

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 brought up Bach, I thought I'd share a minor discovery I was excited to make this week. My wife was practicing one of the "little preludes" by Bach - BWV 999 in C minor (although it ends in G major, an interesting aspect of this piece in itself). Listening from the other room, I was immediately struck by a sound I wasn't expecting: a perfectly clear example of an augmented sixth chord around half-way through. This chord was pretty rare in Bach's day, although it became much more popular not long after. It is a sound a jazz musician would recognize as a tritone substitution. And actually, the resolution in the Bach is one that a jazz musician would also appreciate - the V7 chord that follows is voiced with a b9.

Here it is in context (the passage is in G minor):

You have to be a pretty serious theory nerd to get excited by this, I suppose, but anyhow, maybe you can use this to win a bar bet some time :-)

For much more about this and other chords and their function in music, see my online course, Harmony and Chord Progressions.