Working with Musescore

Reporting on a work in progress on Musescore, ever since Finale's parent company MakeMusic informed us their program would self-annihilate along with our current computer hardware, and destroy all of our prior musical output along with it. Actually they'll just render it unreadable, forever.*

* - Actually, after much outcry from outraged users, they may be waffling on that. 

No problem. I've been working with Musescore, a free, open source alternative, this week. I am not psychologically equipped to learn it methodically through the handbook, I have to put my ape-paws on it and start trying to make stuff. I'm figuring it out patchwork-style, with a lot of googling ways to do specific things.  

This first draft thing is a different arrangement of that recent double time thing. That's my thing lately, playing through a crap-ton of related things in one sitting. We could call this Stick Control for easy fast dense stuff, on the drum set.  

So then: Musescore is quite different from Finale; its texture seems more word processor-like, HTML-like. More line (of text) oriented and table oriented— everything has to be placed on a line, and within a frame. You're not so free to just drag things around the page. For laying out the page, everything goes in an interlocking block of space you create for it. The major unit of measure is not points, pixels, centimeters or inches, but staff spaces— the space between lines on the musical staff. 

Setting up my template, I've been in the style settings a lot— tweaking things to match the style and layout of my work in Finale. Like with HTML, and word processors (I'm thinking Libreoffice), Musescore is quite style sheet oriented— it's set up to encourage you to orient that way. Probably a good thing workflow-wise. In Finale it's too easy just to keep re-doing that stuff with every individual document.  

The music itself is entered into the document most efficiently with the keyboard, using the number pad for the rhythm values and the letters for the instrument or pitch. There's a legend at the bottom of the screen to remind you what key stands for what instrument: 

 

This is good: In Finale I spent quite a lot of time changing note heads. In Musescore it's quite easy to set up what you need at the beginning, for the entire document— where it says “edit drumset.” I probably could have done that in Finale, but they weren't as nice about putting that right in front of you. 

  Different thing: in Finale you can place a note and move it to another pitch, change its value, replace it with a rest, or delete its value entirely. In Musescore it seems more linear, and changes are done by overwriting rather than modifying. It seems more left-to-right oriented, although there are probably ways to key around that.  

Note: In fact, there are different modes for entering and modifying notes. I've only been using the default “step time” mode. I think it will be a good idea to get very fluent with that before messing with the other modes. 

It reminds me of the Linux-world vi text editor— both apps have different modes (that part isn't entirely clear to me yet), and both use the keyboard to type the words, as well as to navigate the document. There are a lot of hotkeyed cursor movements in both programs. 

Typing text is different. In Finale there are set types of text that are placed on the page as defined in the document styles, but you can also just put a cursor anywhere on the page and start typing, and drag it around freely afterwards. 

In Musescore most kinds of text are assigned a specific purpose, and have to be placed within a frame. This probably results in a cleaner, more orderly looking page, but if you're used to just putting crap wherever you want, it will feel restrictive. And, as with WYSIWYG HTML editors, I think you defy that at your peril. Things can go very wrong, unpredictable, and weird if you try to force that kind of free placement in this kind of app.  

Basically, so far, so good. in using this app I'll probably have to update a few minor stylistic things. It does seem to encourage economical work habits. I'll attempt something more complex, like a transcription, and report back.