Ties: Allows you to tie together 2 or more notes/chords. There are hotkeys for each, but I personally haven’t memorized them. Note duration: As I mentioned, whole notes, half notes, quarters, etc. From left to right: Note input mode (this can be toggled by pressing ‘n’), note duration (16th, whole, 128th, etc), augmentation dot, double augmentation dot, ties, rest, accidentals, flip, voicings. You probably won’t have to adjust the zoomĮverything else on this line is unimportant save for the play and rewind buttons.īelow that is note options. The arrows are another way of undoing and redoing, but this is easy to do with ctrl+z/y anyway. Everything from there until the arrows is rather unimportant and can be done with the aforementioned menus anyway. The very first button is a shortcut for making a new score.
Plugins and Help: Nothing of particular interest, at least to me. With these options you can get rid of those vocal measures for authenticity. Most sheet music has no vocal track above the introduction measures.
Style: Under general you have the option of hiding empty staves. You can fit more measure lines onto a single page if you play around with it enough, though this isn’t always necessary. Layout: Page settings is the only good option, where you can change the size of a single page. Notes: The only important stuff here has hotkeys. Everything but adding measures are easy to do without this menu. The rest is unimportant.Īdd: Allows you to add stuff like measures, frames, or crescendos. Master palette for rare or obscure signals (such as ‘ffff’ or ‘pppppp’ dynamics), synthesizer is for managing master volume and sound plugins, piano keyboard is if you want to see the notes played on an actual keyboard. View: Allows you to open up a few important panels if need be. Measure options are for deleting measures if necessary. The former is where you can add or remove instruments (but not swap one with another unless you copy and paste everything). Of particular interest is ‘score properties’ where you can edit stuff like the copyright text should you mess it up.Įdit: The only real important options here are ‘Instruments’ and the ‘Measure’ subcategory. I estimate less than a 1/4th of these options will go unused in the average score, but it’s good to be prepared.Īnd now for a quick run-down of what everything does, starting from the very top:įile: Mostly options for exporting the score, or saving it. It already says that for mine, but it might say basic for you. First, set the drop-down menu on the bottom-left to advanced. Basically just hit next until your test score appears before you.īefore you actually do anything, we need to go over all the options you have available to you (there’s a lot). Hit next, then scroll down until you see the option for Voice+Piano, since that’s what you’ll be dealing with in this project.įrom there keep the default options. When you get to actually transcribing stuff I recommend filling in as much of these fields as possible for the purpose of authenticity and information. Nothing terribly important here, just skip it for now. This will help explain some of the more complicated things, and might assist you in understand some of the things I mention (though I’ll try to make sure it won’t come to that).įor the purpose of this tutorial, do what you want to do first, then close the start center, go under File and click ‘New’. I do recommend pressing the arrows below it until you see a link for the MuseScore guidebook. If you want, you can attempt the interactive tutorial, but I’ll be going over it as we go through this. When you first start up MuseScore, you should be faced with something similar to this (kindly ignore the songs I’ve been working on myself):įrom here you have a few options on what to do next.
To begin, here is the first of what I assume will be a 3-part series on how to use this program. As a long-time user of MuseScore, I am here to assist as many of you as possible in using this program effectively.
Recently the SheetMusicSinger project has begun using MuseScore to help transcribe the many songs we’ve dug up, and also to help speed up the existing process.