In recognition of the change of season, I am going to try something special this week in the MuseScore Café: I challenge you to create and share an original four-part vocal arrangement, setting a classic poem about fall to music! To learn more, tune in live Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30...

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This week in the MuseScore Café, we look at keys in music - key signatures, modulation, and the relationship between keys, modes, and scales. I talk about the music itself and show how everything works in MuseScore. As always, we get underway at 12:30 PM (16:30 GMT) on Wednesday. Tune in live...

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This week in the MuseScore Café, I will create a new piece of music live in real-time, on the spur of the moment! I will talk through my process both in terms of the composition itself and how I notate it in MuseScore. I tried this for a Café last year and we had a lot of fun but I didn't get a...

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This week in the MuseScore Café, I discuss ways of integrating MuseScore into an environment that may involve a variety of different devices, tools, websites, and of course other musicians. I will demonstrate how I use MuseScore on Chromebook and on Windows as part of my work in education as...

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This week in the MuseScore Café, I discuss writing for wind instruments - woodwinds, brass, harmonica, etc. There are all sorts of general principles to be aware of, also some instrument-specific considerations. As usual, the Café is Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern time, which is currently 16:30...

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I find that one of the biggest hurdles people face in learning music theory is a misunderstanding about what music theory actually is. People hear about all these "rules" they have to learn. They worry they won't be able to remember them all. They fear that if they follow the rules, their music...

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This Wednesday in the MuseScore Cafe - a special session on ear "cross training" for music theory! OK, you're probably wondering what I mean by that. Well, I have been tinkering with this idea that since music is an essentially aural phenomenon, it should be possible to learn almost everything...

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As some of you may have already seen, MuseScore 3.5 is now officially released. For a "minor" release, it has quite a few significant new features and other improvements. I plan to publish a full article about these soon, and also update my online course to cover the changes. But since the...

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If you play jazz, rock, folk, or really any style of music other than classical, chances are you regularly encounter chord symbols like C or Em or G7 or Fmaj7 or D13#11 or A9sus. If you know your major and minor triads but are less comfortable with anything beyond that, this is for...

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In the latest episode of my MuseScore Café series, I proposed a collaborative composition project. You - yes you - are invited to submit your original melodies over a short progression that I have provided, and I will assemble the submissions into a finished composition (the form being loosely...

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