🎼 is MuseScore any good?

(my honest review)

So far in this series, we’ve discussed:

• what a “music director” does

• who else is on the team

  • (vocal arranger, horn arranger, music copyist, choreographer, etc)

• our tools & workflows

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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One cool thing about MuseScore:

You can download other people’s scores (if you pay extra).

Whole bunch of preexisting charts for STP’s Plush...

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.

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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

1. 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.

2. ie people who create Broadway scores, sheet music for publication, orchestral arrangements, charts for recording sessions, etc

3. 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.

4. most often when hiding instruments & switching to quarter notes

5. ie one that allows you to create a shortcut for any item in any palette. It’s unbelievable that this isn’t available.