So far in this series, we’ve discussed:
(vocal arranger, horn arranger, music copyist, choreographer, etc)
In today’s post, we’ll look at the newest tool in my kit.
A “score writer” is software for creating sheet music.
You can think of it like a word processor. Only instead of text, it’s for music notation. Scorewriters (and word processors) let you organize your ideas on the page, format them, and then share them.
A lot of guitar music is transcribed in GuitarPro or SoundSlice.
But if you’re creating charts for a a band, you want a full-featured scorewriter like Finale, Dorico, or Sibelius.
The main player here is Sibelius.
(eg I know 5x more Sibelius users than Finale users, and MAYBE one person who uses Dorico.)
(also, in the interest of full transparency: I’m friends with Sibelius’s “Product Owner”1 )
But there’s another, newer scorewriter that’s winning the bulk of entry-level users.
MuseScore.
It’s open source & free,
so they boast more users than any other scorewriter.
But true professionals2 look down their noses at MuseScore.
MuseScore has rolled out A LOT of improvements in the last 18 months,
and I got a firsthand look at how that’s playing out, because…
In the past, our band was all over the place:
I used Sibelius,
the singers used MuseScore,
the horn arranger used Finale,
and some of the drum charts were handwritten.
It was a giant mess to organize, with mismatched measure numbers & section names. Rehearsal was sooooo much more difficult than it should have been.
That’s why my bosses gave me a clear directive:
going forward, we would like to have everything in MuseScore.”
the horn charts,
the vocal arrangements,
& the rhythm section parts.
So: what did I learn about MuseScore?
TL;DR—MuseScore isn’t a professional-grade tool… yet.
It’s buggy. It crashes. It’s infuriatingly slow. It’s missing some features that should be table stakes. Their preferred install method (“MuseHub”) has a massive cybersecurity risk3 that they don’t seem too concerned with.
And yet for all of that… they’ll probably “win” in the end.
If I were Sibelius/Finale/Dorico, MuseScore would keep me up at night.
Alright, let me get some gripes off my chest.
A list of things I hate about MuseScore.
Don’t misunderstand me: this isn’t a get-off-my-lawn rant.
I’ve tried to avoid making criticisms that are simply “I’m used to doing this a different way in Sibelius.” But still: there were an awful lot of things that had me yelling curse words at the computer.
Here are *some* of the things that I think prevent MuseScore from being a professional-grade tool:
Don’t wanna watch? Here’s a few highlights:
MuseScore crashes a lot.4
You can’t copy/paste measure repeats.
If you’ve selected more than one item, you can move them with the mouse… but not with the arrow keys.
Re-opening a saved file causes the font, size, & position of measure numbers to reset to their defaults.
If you open a dropdown menu of fonts, you can’t navigate the list by typing the first letter of the font you’re looking for.
When you click into text (like a chord or a lyric) to edit it, where do you think the cursor lands? At the beginning? The end? Exactly where you clicked it? Or maybe it highlights-all? Nope. The cursor is… just somewhere randomly in the middle of the text. WTF?
There are truly bizarre bugs like this one, where the note input cursor jumps many many measures away.
I tried to replace two bars of slashes with a 2-bar repeat.
But apparently you can’t overwrite slashes with measure repeats.
You have to first delete the slashes, then add the measure repeat.
Ok, that’s dumb. But you know what’s even dumber?
When I hit delete, it didn’t delete the slashes.
It deleted the 2-measure repeat from the palette of available commands!
So so so many of these gripes stem from MuseScore’s great weakness:
MuseScore is unacceptably labor-intensive.
You need the mouse to do almost anything.
The small handful of things you can do with both hands on the keyboard still somehow take 2-3 more strokes than in rival scorewriters. This sounds like first-world laziness. But when you multiply those little 2-second inconveniences out over a long score with many instruments, you wind up wasting tens of hours over the course of a project.
A proper shortcuts editor5 would solve a lot of this.
One cool thing about MuseScore:
You can download other people’s scores (if you pay extra).
This can give you a headstart, help you transcribe an instrument you don’t play, and let you see how someone more experienced would approach it.
That said, transcriptions are often just plain wrong.
That’s all I got this week.
Next week we’ll look at the Ableton file we use onstage & in rehearsal.
See you then,
Josh
Joe & I worked together at Home Depot when we were kids, restacking bags of landscaping gravel in the hot summer sun. Years later, I discovered that he was now the guy making the app I spent several hours a day using. Life is funny that way.
ie people who create Broadway scores, sheet music for publication, orchestral arrangements, charts for recording sessions, etc
I am completely unqualified to weigh in on this. But smart-sounding people are riled up about it in their support forums. Here’s why I won’t install MuseHub: it has root-level access → it’s tied to an open-source project deployed on millions of computers→ and that sounds a lot like this narrowly averted cyber attack.
most often when hiding instruments & switching to quarter notes
ie one that allows you to create a shortcut for any item in any palette. It’s unbelievable that this isn’t available.