Musescore: conclusions

So, that Billy Cobham transcription pretty well settled it: Musescore is a perfectly fine replacement for the soon-to-be-self-annihilating[? -tb] Finale. For my purposes: writing drumming materials, and lead sheets. 

There are a few very minor things I need to figure out, but the basic thing is solid. In a couple of weeks I'm as fast as I ever was with Finale— a lot about it is clearly better than Finale.

The whole endeavor is more orderly, with all the necessary stuff nice and visible. In Finale things are scattered under any of several menus. In Musescore of the universal style settings are under one giant menu (under format>style), and all the local style settings are instantly available under the properties tab. 

Note entry is more obscure at first, but ultimately more economical than Finale— it takes fewer keystrokes/mouse clicks to do the same thing. Editing generally is easier. It does behave surprisingly at times— better familiarity with the basic modes will help with that. 

Non-default spacing of staves is a little funny— it's done not by setting the actual width/spacing of the staff, but by adding a blank frame, which acts as a spacer. You can adjust that with the mouse, or set an exact size in the frame's properties. Not as direct as the staff size properties in Finale.  

Tuplets are great. Select the overall note value, then the type of tuplet you want to divide it into. EG, select quarter note, then triplet = eighth note triplet. Nesting tuplets is also easy, just select a note of the tuplet, and make a tuplet out of it. In Finale they're a pain, and often behave very strangely.

Not having a universal “text tool”— for just plopping a cursor anywhere— takes some getting used to, but it's fine. All text has a particular function, with a particular default placement. Musescore is more conducive to an orderly looking page. 

Some general thoughts/suggestions:

Make your template first
Using the settings under format>style decide what you want all your documents to look like, and save that in a file named template (and template_bac for when you accidentally save a change you don't want). Open the template for every new thing you're going to write, and immediately save it under the file name of whatever thing you're writing.   

Use the keyboard
You can't be doing everything with the mouse. Learn all the shortcuts for the major things you need to do. Get used to num pad = rhythm / hot keys = the notes / arrow keys = reassign notes that have no hotkey. 

And get used to hitting the esc key. In note-entering mode, it's easy to accidentally alter your score. Type some notes, hit esc to make changes to them, or to do something else.   

And the arrows, and ctrl, shift, strl-shift, alt, and shift-drag (with mouse, to select an area). And the number pad. I need to get better at navigating the document/program just with the keyboard— pointing at something with the mouse really slows things down.   

Rebuild the drum set palette
It's in a wild order as far as placing notes on a staff is concerned. So if you type in a note and then revoice it with the up/down arrow keys, you'll cycle through the instruments in this order: 

It's kind of random. Apparently the only way to fix that is to remake the entire thing:

1. Go to edit drumset.
2. Select an entry, and delete its name. 
3. Click the No. column so the entries are listed 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.
4. Fill in new instrument names starting from the bottom of the staff and ascending— of the opposite. 
5. Give the instrument a name, assign it a proper notehead, move it to the correct line on the staff, and assign it a shortcut. I put all of my stuff on the same stems, so I set everything for default voice 1, stems up. If you want bass drum/hihat pedal on separate stems, select default voice 2, stems down for them.
6. Be thorough and do them in order— anything you have to add later will appear out of order at the end of your palette. 
7. I assigned hotkeys as: A - snare, B - bass, C - crash, D - floor tom, E - high tom, F - hihat/foot, G - cymbal (I put both hihat and ride above the top line of the of the staff, and indicate one or the other with a written note. If they're both playing at the same time, I'll put one on another line however is convenient). 

That will give you a palette like this, which is much quicker when revoicing instruments up or down the staff. And also just using the key as a visual reference. 

From bottom to top— instruments on the same line separated by slash: 

Hihat with foot

Bass

Floor tom 2

Floor tom

Snare drum / rim click

Mid tom 

High tom

Higher tom

Hihat or ride / bell / misc diamond notehead / highest tom

Cymbal 2

Crash / China

Splash

WARNING: That may wreak holy hell on MIDI applications, I have no idea how it will affect that, and don't care. For now— I may come to regret that. Probably save two forms of your template— one with the default assignments intact, another with the new ones.

There you go. Onward and upward. Get Musescore here. 

Transcription: Flight For Freedom - 01

OK, first complete transcription using Musescore, doing basically everything I need it to do for this site. Same recording I've been working with, Flight For Freedom by Oliver Nelson, from his record Skull Session, with Shelly Manne on drums. There was some dispute over whether it might have been Jim Gordon instead— we'll listen to one of his tracks from this record and check out the difference. 

This is the first minute of the track: 

I think he's using a four piece set plus a couple of concert toms. Mostly rides on the hihat, and he hits that ugly sounding swish cymbal quite often. And a crash cymbal, and he gets onto the ride cymbal at the end. Towards the end there's an unusual percussion sound I can't identify— I think he's playing it, but it could be someone else. He did quirky stuff like that at times. 

I really want my thing of notating half-open hihats with a tenuto mark to catch on. 

Get the pdf

Check out this track with Jim Gordon for comparison: 

Gordon hits harder, and is more aggressive, has a little sharper edge as a pure groove player— he seems more polished for this kind of music. Manne perhaps makes some more unusual choices, and is looser. They're both playing with a lot of forward momentum, I can't define the difference in quality of groove between them— Manne feels more “behind the beat”, but I'm not sure that's accurate at all. These are pretty nuanced impressions— they're both right on it, and have done a thousand sessions at this point, and are great. I enjoy Manne's playing more, he's warmer; Gordon is like a machine for this kind of playing. Not to say he sounds machine-like— do you dig the distinction? 

Feelings and impressions are hilarious— the words that come into your head may not be the actual thing happening on the recording. 

Listen to the rest of the record. Gordon plays on Skull Session, Dumpy Mama, and Japanese Garden.
 

Musescore notes: 

I've actually got it pretty close to where I want it, with the appearance of my template, and with using it. Two or three days of fussing around is actually not bad. 

Stem length
A lingering visual annoyance was the general stubby appearance of the notes. Under format > style > notes I saw that the shorten stems box was checked by default. I set the shortened stem length to 2.95sp— a little shorter than the default non-shortened stem length.  

Work modes

Navigating the various work modes are still a little obscure. I'll be hitting the Esc key often to switch from note entry mode— which doesn't always act the way I expect it to— to doing general stuff mode, where I can select measures and individual notes/articulations/text to do something with them.  

Note entry
Entering notes I use the keys a lot— hotkeys for the major drum sounds, arrows for navigating, number pad for rhythm value, + shift key to enter two notes in unison. For drum sounds that don't have a hotkey, I highlight the note/rest then mouse click on the thing I want in the key at the bottom of the window. For anything else I use the mouse to select it. 

Using the arrow keys, sometimes moving L-R selects the next note or articulation in a stack, sometimes not. 

Exporting
Really easy. For some reason my version of Finale sucked for exporting pdfs and jpegs— I had to use a pdf printer app (cutepdf, it's quite useful) to export to pdf, and then actually upload it to a web site (online2pdf.com, also quite useful) to convert it to a jpeg. Really dumb, and time consuming. 

Musescore has a nice friendly PUBLISH tab at the top of the screen that lets you output it any number of ways quickly and easily. 

Note entry is the main thing I need to get sorted out. I'll do a dedicated post for that in the next few days. Or not— I'm not sure how helpful my personal notes will be for people. Just read this page on entering notes and this page on navigating the document. 

Working with Musescore - 02

Getting further into Musescore with an easy Shelly Manne transcription, a rock arrangement called Flight For Freedom, from Oliver Nelson's record Skull Session. I like Manne's rock playing— it's a little different, with a great deep sound and pocket.  

These are things I had to figure out while making it, in the order they came up.  

I first had to make some adjustments to my template:  

Cleaning up palettes
Under the palettes tab, there are a number of things I don't need: clef, pitch, key signature, etc.

Click on the unwanted thing, hit the [...] options button, and select hide. 

Then click add palettes and select some things to add: grace notes, lines, whatever else you want.

Editing the drumset
I want to set up my template with every drum I'm likely to need, with a proper note head and hot key.

In note entry mode, at the bottom of the screen you should see a key to the drum set, with an edit drum set.  

Under edit drum set, you can just click an empty slot on the left side of the window, and give it a name, notehead, and line/space on the right side of the window. I don't care about playback, so I haven't figured out how to assign sounds. 

And of course you can modify existing entries by clicking on them, and changing them the same ways. 

Problem: it looks like I only get hotkeys for the letters A-G. I want more than that, we'll see if it's possible.

Here is the current state of the transcription: 

I really need to figure out how entering text works.
UPDATE: In fact, you just drag it where ever you want after typing it.

Pickup measure
The drums play a little three note lead in. Select the first measure > right click > select measure properties.

There are settings for nominal and actual measure duration. Reset the actual duration to the length of the pick up measure— three 8th notes in this case.
   

Muting drum sounds while entering music
I'm listening to the piece as I'm transcribing, I don't want to hear their crappy midi drum sounds while I'm doing that.

At the top of the screen hit edit > preferences > note input > uncheck play notes while editing. 

Flams
Select the note you want to embellish, go to the palettes tab > grace notes, click on the symbol for the type of grace note you want to add. For ruffs, click repeatedly for the number of grace notes you want. 

To move the grace notes to a different drum, select the note and use the up/down arrows.

Problem: on the palette they're pictured with a little slur attaching it to the note it embellishes, but they don't render that way in the score. You can add a slur by selecting a note and hitting the S key, but the slur is not scaled for a grace note, and was not attached to the note I wanted. You can move it, but it's a little weird.   

Articulations
Select the note you want, click appropriate articulation in the articulations palette. 

To remove, right click on the articulation and hit delete. There's got to be a better way of doing that. 

To remove all articulations in a measure or region, right click the articulation then select > similar in this range > then delete.  

Annoyance: I want some articulations to be positioned further above the beams than the default. You can change that in the articulations palette— right click on the symbol > select properties, change y axis: -.5 sp (for example) But: the position change shows in the palette, but not in the score. 

I also don't like the appearance of all of them— will need to get into the settings to correct that, if possible. 

Noteheads
The first cymbal hit is a swish cymbal (man, those A. Zildjian swishes sound bad). You can permanently add something to the drum set instrument following the directions above, or change the note head for a single note by selecting the note, then the properties tab > note > notehead > select the notehead you want. 

Line breaks
In Finale we set the number of measures for each line via a setting. Ctrl-M, I think. In Musescore, reminiscent of a word processor, you just hit enter where you want the line break to be. 

Double bars
Click on the measure you want, go to the barlines palette, click the appropriate thing. Easy. 

Ghost notes
Indicated by a parenthesis around the notehead. They're easy; select the note, then the properties tab > note > notehead parentheses.

Problem: since we often deal with groups of ghost notes, having open and close parentheses on every note will quickly clutter up the page. I need options for note + open parenthesis and note + close parenthesis. 

UPDATE: There are open and close parenthesis symbols hiding in the MASTER PALETTE (shift + f9 to view), under noteheads. Click on the thing you want in the master palette, and drag it to your working palette for your template. 

It's going pretty good. I need to get a handle on entering and positioning text, and get better just navigating the program and entering/working with notes. The modes are still a little obscure— “note entry” mode, and some other kind of mode. 

The way the music is scaled on the page bothers me. Copying the dimensions accurately from Finale to Musescore will be problematic, because they are entered in inches in Finale, and in staff spaces (mostly) in Musescore. Onward. 

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. 

Finale to self-exterminate

Heads up to Finale users— Finale's publisher, MakeMusic, made this announcement yesterday:  

35 years ago, Coda Music Technologies, now MakeMusic, released the first version of Finale, blah blah blah.

Four decades is a very long time in the software industry blah blah blah.

Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry blah blah blah.

The important part: 

Effective immediately, we are announcing these changes:

• There will be no further updates to Finale, or any of its associated tools (PrintMusic, Notepad, Songwriter)
• It is no longer possible to purchase or upgrade Finale in the MakeMusic eStore
• Finale will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed (barring OS changes)

After one year, beginning August 2025, these changes will go into effect:

• It will not be possible to authorize Finale on any new devices, or reauthorize Finale
• Support for Finale v27 or any other version of Finale will no longer be available

Basically, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry, because we're going to annihilate it.

You can't buy Finale any more, and in one year your ownership of Finale is terminated, as far as installing it on a new computer, or reauthorizing it on your current computer is concerned. When your current computer dies, or your current operating system dies, Finale dies, forever.  

They claim to have partnered with Dorico— to the extent that, for an unknown period of time, Dorico is offering Finale users a discount on their product. There is apparently no integration whatsoever to aid you in moving to their platform. To rescue your Finale files from oblivion, you have to use Finale to convert them to xml files, which you can then import it to Dorico, Musescore, or something else. Tick tock, people.

Converting every single thing you've ever written to xml would be a huge task, of course— I have thousands of files to convert— you'll need the Dolet Finale plugin, which has batch processing capability. You can get it through the Finale site, or through other sites. I also had to install Java (32 bit version) to install it. Then you can open you work up in the new program and see how mutilated it was in translation. 

For example, here is a page of an Elvin Jones transcription as I finished it in Finale, and how it looks when I opened the xml file in Musescore, and in Dorico SE 5 (the free version): 

Of course I don't expect the other programs to copy my original formatting exactly, but this gives you an idea of the enormity of the curation problem Finale users now face— you'll have to batch convert everything you did to this. That this is even necessary is the result of a business decision by MakeMusic. 

It would have been kinder if they made Finale open source, or abandonware, with no future updates or support. Perhaps it will be possible to install a pirated version of Finale— if it doesn't require authorizing through Finale. I don't know how that's done, whether pirated versions bypass authorization, or spoof a legal authorization. 

Now, you may be asking, if Finale did this to me after 30-some years in operation, what will stop Dorico from doing the same thing, any time after right now? 

You poor, wonderful, innocent, ridiculous person. Nothing is stopping them from doing that, they can render your work unreadable at the drop of a business decision. Clearly archival preservation of users' work is not a consideration for these businesses.  

This makes Musescore a very attractive alternative. Even if major development of it ends, it can never be wiped out this way. At least you should preserving your work in some kind of archival format as you go— print and/or pdfs, if nothing else. Frigging jpeg exports people. Anything to preserve your work in a finished state so it can be read and played by a human. 

I'll be working with Dorico and Musescore in coming weeks, and will report on my experiences. Good luck! 

Surveying styles of drum notation

I was recently critiqued on my notation style, by someone who knows their stuff— who also knows their stuff— and I got paranoid that I was writing in a stupid way, so I went to my library to re-check what other people actually do. 

You may have noticed, I virtually always put drum set materials on one set of stems. It's a doctrinal thing I decided to follow a long time ago: the drum set is one instrument, what we play on it is one rhythm, using four limbs. It's a common way of writing, but not the only way. In the past, drum set music was generally written as if the different parts were being played by different people, like a band part for snare drum and bass drum.

It's a difficult problem, because the drums are not normally played by reading a mapped out drum part verbatim— most of what we play is basically improvised, possibly with a sketched out groove suggested by a drum chart. But in the practice room we need to read a lot more particular, complex things than we would normally see in a drum chart, and that's where judgments about style come in, with the concerns being the best way to render an idea for the purposes of the materials.   

So let's check out what is done in some some drumming library favorites (and otherwise): 

Jim Chapin - Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer - 1948
The earliest modern representation of drumming independence that I'm aware of. He writes the main exercises both with the cymbal and snare drum and cymbal parts separately, but with them unified into a single rhythm, on a single set of stems:  

And those are still the main ways drums are notated today. They each have advantages. The single-stem way for the reasons I gave above. The two-part way because it's clearer what rhythm we're doing with the independent part. 

Rhythmic Patterns - Joe Cusatis - 1963
This kind of situation is more usual in older drum set notation— and it's totally barbaric and unreadable. At least the drums played with the hands are on the same stems. 

Further, each page includes a big key at the top of the page reminding you which line goes with which drum, as well as the markings you see here, like you're going to forget from page to page, or as you move your eye down the page. 

This is kind of a long post— much more below the fold: 

Stickings in Finale

A quick thing for you frustrated Finale users*: Here's how you write stickings. You probably tried adding them as text, and met with bitter failure, then you tried them as lyrics, met with bitter failure, and you felt deeply sad and ridiculous. 

* - Insert obvious joke.  

The answer is to enter them as articulations. Articulations. 

Yes, articulations, the same tool you use to do accents, rolls, dots, staccato marks, etc. To do that: 

1. Select the articulation tool. 

Well, first open your template file— a blank file with all your usual settings in it, so you don't have to do this every freakin' time you write something. Then: 

1. Select the articulation tool. 
2. Click on a note. 
3. When the articulation selection window opens, select CREATE. 
4. That will open the ARTICULATION DESIGNER window. Copy these settings:  

Don't think, just do it. 

5. You'll have to select a normal text font— so hit SET FONT. Assign whatever you're using for all the text in your template. 

Click OK to seal in your decision, and close that dialog.  

If you don't know what to use, use Arial. Don't screw around.

6. Back in the ARTICULATION DESIGNER dialog, click MAIN to select the character you want to use for your sticking. I suggest starting with good old R. Click OK to close that, and OK to close the ARTICULATION DESIGNER dialog.  

7. Back in the ARTICULATION SELECTION dialog, click on the sticking you just created, and then click DUPLICATE. Scroll down to the duplicate sticking you just duplicated, and select EDIT. EDIT. Then hit MAIN to assign the sticking you want. Logic and convention dictates that we make this one L. 

Repeat for whatever other stickings you want— duplicate, then edit. 

8. Save and close.

PROBLEM! When you use your new sticking articulations with more than a single line of drums, you get something like this:  

I haven't figured out how to get them to render in a normal straight line when the notes are on different lines/spaces. So when you're all done writing your page of stuff, you need to highlight all the notes on the same line (hold down shift and select with the mouse), and use the up/down arrow keys to move them where you want them. It helps if you hit VIEW>GRID/GUIDE>SHOW GRID. 

It's a pain in the butt, but that's Finale for you. Like everything else that's a PITB, you learn to get pretty fast with it. 

BONUS! You can also use this same procedure to put counts in your music. Do all the same stuff, but use these settings: 

I have symbols for the numerals 1-7, e, &, a. Unfortunately we have the same problem when doing this on more than one line of music, but you shouldn't be marking in the counts very often anyway. 

Open-source music notation software

Via my man David Valdez, here's Musescore, a new free music notation program. I've gotten reasonably comfortable with Finale, and have developed kludges for doing most of the weird things I want to do with it, and I don't know if I want to re-learn it all on a new program. Let us know what you think.

Here's their little tutorial for creating a drum part: