July 29, 2015 : Software For Music Documentation: MuseScore

After completing a short, there are always a few after-the-fact items I need to tackle (in addition to getting a little R&R). One of the more time consuming things is documenting/ scoring the music I had written. For my guitar pieces, I tend to scribble down the general rhythm along with any lead parts I feel are deserving.

This doesn’t take very long; but for pieces written/ recorded with my MIDI Keyboard, I do a more formal transcription. In the past, I have done these by hand… on a sheet of paper with a ruler and pen. It is pretty time intensive but worth the effort. However, this time around, I used a scorewriter – specifically, MuseScore. Below is a screenshot of the program.

Overall, I was very pleased with my experience using the program. Not only was it free, which is always a good thing, but it greatly sped the process up. Despite being open source, it was fairly easy to use and had a lot of capabilities to address the various types of compositions I wanted to document.

Plus, it resulted in neater output files. MuseScore is able to output to a PDF, which easily gave me an digital copy of my music. The only downside was that it did take a little time to figure out the basics of the program (along with its shortcut keys), but they had a solid online Help Doc to get me up to speed.

Needless to say, I definitely plan on doing future transcriptions digitally.

posted by Pi Visuals at 7:43 pm

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