I’m not a good musician.
I can sing okay, but not great. I
can play the piano but only early-intermediate level (no real Mozart for me,
only the dumbed down stuff). I can play
guitar, but that’s worse than the piano from lack of use. Don’t get me started on middle school
trombone. But all those are in order of
regular use. Engineers don’t generally
take music theory…and I didn’t though I did sing in the choir my senior year of
college, but that was only because my girlfriend suckered me into it. I would
not have tried out otherwise, though I did enjoy the experience.
Long story shortened, I heard a song on the radio and wanted
to try to sing it at church, found some sheet music online and bought it as an
electronic PDF but it had several thing against it. It was not in the right key, it was spaced
out to 5 pages long(our church likes thing 3 pages or less and it was not written the way I was used to (we use
something called “Solfege” notation at our church so what I had needed to be
converted). I spent about 2 weeks
complaining that I didn’t have a way to change it short of spending “all that
money” on finale (a software app used by composers to digitally notate and
compose music) because that was all I knew existed.
I felt like a victim a little bit.
Complaining is just that kind of thing, you say but don’t do
something, and I didn’t. Finally over the New Year’s break I sat down and did
the 2 second google search of “free music writing software” and got several
options. After spending too long down a
couple of Reddit-holes, I decided to download MuseScore to my 10 year old
laptop and hope for the best.
The music I’d bought was a PDF and MuseScore said it could
import PDF’s and I was stoked but the import was messed up because of the music
fonts the writer used. So I had to
settle down over 3+ days and manually enter every note and lyric of the 5-page
score and figure out how to condense the space down to 2 pages. After playing
with it for a week now, I thought it’d be a good idea to let you know what I
think of the software. You might want to create something on your own.
1. It’s like a
programmer made a music program.
The interface is pretty sparse and looks a little windows
95, with flyout toolbars that you can remove on top and on both sides. You can actually manually click-in notes with
a mouse, but it’s a 2-step process.
Click the duration, click the score location, and hope you didn’t mess
it up. Though you can click and drag
stuff around pretty seamlessly. The
program uses an extensive list of hot-keys, so 1-9 keys stand for durations,
A-G keys stand for notes, and alt,shift and control buttons can be used for a
wide variety of things. Once I learned
this it was pretty easy to notate “relatively” quickly. I’ve heard Finale functions like this too so
it’s not really surprising how it works, just don’t expect it to be really
quick without practice.
Below is a screenshot.
2. The kids will get
a kick out of it.
It’s kind of like a new language and I’m not particularly
afraid to let the kids mess with the program since there’s almost nothing they
can mess up. They can do a little of
anything they want and they certainly did.
They won’t pick the hot-keys up fast, but to tell them to just plunk in
notes with A-G is an interesting lesson in modes and progression, or maybe 21st
century music. Up-down arrows make
accidentals appears so that can be a lot interesting too.
They don’t actually have to be able to play an instrument to
make some form of sound. Mozart had to
learn all the music theory before he could compose. My kids don’t have to to create, though the
music theory would make it easier. The
ability to create a full score with multiple instruments will lead to some fun
exercises. You can even add lyrics to
the music.
3. It’s free and not
version-stale.
Can’t beat free. A
non-student version of Finale is $600.
MuseScore runs on Windows and Mac and it’s being updated about every
month or so, so it’s not something that’s stale, or unstable. A lot of open-source software can get to a
point where the last version is sort-of useful, but isn’t being updated and
eventually the updates on your computer operating system can wreak havoc and
cause problems with old stale software.
I’m less likely to keep anything (even apps on my phone) that isn’t
updated regularly.
4. It’s probably MEANT to be used on a large
screen(or two).
My 14 inch laptop led to a lot of frustration just because
the interfaces can be pretty crammed.
Having a larger screen or more real estate would have made the
easier. But overall I got used to it and
was able to shutdown the sidebars when I didn’t need them to give me space.
Overall I will continue to use this program and as a result
of my positive experience I’ve got at least one other project I’m contemplating. You don’t have to be a musician or trained in
theory to use it, but a basic understanding of music is probably best. I think using it to let kids experiment would
be a really good use of it, regardless if they are little prodigies or not. Go look it up and see. Download available at MuseScore.org.
-Randy
Note: I was not paid in anyw
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