TogsTech

Part 4: The Manucript Music

Welcome to Week 4 of my Music Education Blog where we discuss all kinds of crazy and exciting things that teachers can use in classrooms (or for fun at home). This week we spent quite a bit of time experimenting with many of the different kinds of electronic manuscript softwares that musicians can use to write their music.

MUSESCORE

This is my most commonly used composition software that I have used throughout University and High School. This is due to the fact that it is free AND operates in a very simple way. This week my knowledge also expanded exponentially learning about many more of the keyboard shortcuts that Musescore (and all of the different compositional software we will use today).

For example – Did you know:

• You can press the letters on your keyboard to write the notes? It sounds fairly basic but for some reason I’ve never tried it out before …
• You can also do a similar thing with numbers correlating to note length!!!!
• Musescore also allows you to upload your scores online to share compositions you’ve made with the public! This means that:
  1. You can have a look at other peoples scores for FREE!!!
  2. You can put YOUR OWN music out there for your students to use as well

Exporting:

• Export using compressed XML file
  • XML files are used as the open universal format that for composers so that you can transfer a score between whatever notation programs you are using

NOTEFLIGHT AND FLAT.IO

I spent some time this week experimenting with some of the cool features of Noteflight while some colleagues used flat.io. I personally found it very similar to Musescore, if not a little bit more clunky and difficult to operate HOWEVER I think with some practice it could be a very useful composition tool

One awesome feature about this is that like Musescore you’re able to upload your scores to an international database to share them, but you can also earn money from better scores you publish on the system. This is a really encouraging way to practice your score writing skills and to share them with the world.

The reason why this previous feature I find so awesome, is because it allows you to take a really awesome arrangement of a piece of music and adapt it, and reshare it to be achievable for students of varying levels. For example if you have a flute quartet where one student is far in front of the others, while another is falling behind a bit, you can adapt your score for these students and then reshare them for future students!

DORICO

I personally found this trailer really awesome! I felt like it effectively encapsulated a heap of different features that other score writing programs fail in, for example, the chord writing through all the parts. Although this is so, I do not compose enough to see the usefulness of this and by having such big names, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content the software utilises.

SIBELIUS

Similarly to all of the previous programs, I felt that Sibelius shared the most features across them all but also has the superior sound features, writing ease and options to extend your composition. I find the bar along the top (seen below) can be extremely daunting with so many options which hardly make sense, although for the most part, information and guidance can be easily found on google.

Some helpful tips I learnt:

• You can go from ‘Menu’ → ‘Panels’ → ‘Ideas’ to be provided with several small riffs and loops you can import into your own compositon
• This is really awesome because
  1. You’re able to save certain riffs or musical ideas you create yourself and add them to expand the panel
  2. You can go into each of the riffs and break them down further

TogsTips

You’re able to copy portions of a score in Musescore by utilising the camera button at the top of your score to ‘export’ a portion of the score. This process removes the grey background of the screenshot and makes it more aesthetically appealing:

Similarly with Sibelius, you can do a special type of screenshot to capture certain bars using the keyboard shortcut ‘alt+G’ (for graphics), and then picking a certain set of bars to copy, from which you paste it where you’d like it to go!