Robert Douglass, a German horn player and MuseScore enthusiast, has a noble project he'd like to share with us. He wants to create a new score and studio recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, and place them in the public domain for everyone to own and use without limitations on licensing.

Bach wrote his seminal work over 270 years ago, yet public domain scores and recordings are hard or impossible to find. Robert is determined to change this. He launched the Open Goldberg Variations project and Robert is now looking for sponsors to fund the project.

This project will start by creating a new engraving of the Goldberg Variations using the MuseScore notation software. Robert contacted Werner, the MuseScore lead developer, and explained his goal. The two connected and Werner decided he would engrave the score himself using MuseScore. It would make a great test case for MuseScore and when it lacks some feature, Werner can improve the code. So double win! The edition will be subject to scholarly review, and when it is finished, it will be available to everyone to own and use without limitations.

Then Robert is also working with pianist Kimiko Ishizaka to create a professional studio recording of the Goldbergs. This recording will also be made available to everyone to own and use without limitations.

For more information:
Official Website: http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org
Kickstarter fundraiser: http://kck.st/opengoldberg

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. For the summer of 2011, the MuseScore developer team is looking for students who would like to work on MuseScore.

When MuseScore gets accepted as a mentoring organization, Google will provide a stipend of 5500 USD per accepted student developer which is shared between the student and the mentor. Read on if you are interested to participate.

For those who are entirely new to MuseScore, download MuseScore and get familiar with the software. For the Google Summer of Code, you can make your own project proposal or select one from this list which will be updated over the coming month with some more ideas.

For more information, read further on the Summer of Code website. You can get in touch with the MuseScore developers on the mailing list or the #musescore IRC channel on freenode.net.

My original lead sheet tutorial was written using MuseScore 1.0, and quite a few things have changed (for the better) between versions 1.0 and 1.1. So I have completely rewritten the tutorial to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of MuseScore 1.1. I am leaving the 1.0 version in place, however, for the benefit of people who for whatever reason are unable to upgrade. Sections in italics are sections that no longer apply to version 1.1 and later.

The new version of the tutorial is located here.

MuseScore contains all the tools needed to create great-looking lead sheets, and for the most part, the process of creating them is at least as easy as with Finale or Sibelius or any other program. However, some things can be tricky to figure out on your own. This article walks you through the process of creating a lead sheet in MuseScore, using a tune of mine in a bebop style as an example. This also serves as something of a tutorial on the process of creating good lead sheets in general.

Initial Setup

Before you begin creating your own lead sheets in MuseScore, there are a few things to configure up front to avoid having to repeat work later.

First, you will want to download the ZIP archive attached to this tutorial and extract the two Jazz Lead Sheet templates and the customchords.xml file. The two templates should be installed in the MuseScore "templates" folder; the xml file to the "styles" folder. The other two files in the archive are the completed lead sheet created for this tutorial (Bud-Like.mscz) and a chart showing the chord symbols that can be entered using customchords.xml as configured. More on that in a moment.

If you decide you would like your own lead sheets to look different than the defaults provided in my templates, you may wish to edit them to do some additional customization and then re-save them. Most of the settings you can customize as part of a template are found in Style->Edit General Style and Style->Edit Text Style. You can browse those dialogs yourself to see if anything strikes you. On my own system, I actually use different fonts for several of the text style elements, but since I don't know what fonts you might have installed, I have stuck to commonly available fonts in my template. In this article, I have customized my title, composer, and poet fonts to use Comic Sans MS, a font normally available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's a font with a bad reputation in some circles, but it's the only "script" font available on all of these systems. You can also customize the settings in the Layout->Page Settings dialog, including the overall scaling of the notation.

The main customization you may wish to make that cannot currently be made through the menus is in how you like to write your chord symbols. The customchords.xml file controls the input and display of chord symbols. It is currently configured to work with the symbols "ma" for major, "mi" for minor, "o" for diminished, and "mi7b5" for half-diminished. This is my own adaptation of the Brandt & Roemer standard. It is very similar to the system used in the New Real Book series from Sher Music, except that I do not use parentheses around my alterations. If you prefer a different system for your chord symbols - like using "maj" for major and "-" for minor as in the original Real Book, or using triangle for major and circle with a slash through it for half-diminished as in some other fakebooks, or using parentheses around alterations - then you will need to edit customchords.xml. The instructions for doing this are included at the top of the file. I have tried to make this process as easy as possible. If you do edit the file, be sure to make a copy of your customized version so that your changes aren't lost the next time you install a new version of MuseScore.

You may also at some point wish to customize your keyboard shortcuts or other program preferences, but let's get on to creating a lead sheet!

Creating A New Document

To create a new lead sheet, go to File->New (or hit the toolbar icon, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-N) and enter your Title, Composer, and Copyright info. Anything you type in the Lyricist field is displayed at top left of the chart, so I use that for instructions like "Med. Swing". In the Copyright field, you can type "(c)" to get the international copyright symbol (if you have enabled that option under Edit->Preferences->Text).

After filling in these fields, select "Create new score from template", hit Next, and select "Jazz Lead Sheet" from the resulting list. At that point you can either hit Finish to get a lead sheet with all defaults, or hit Next to specify the key signature, time signature, pickup measure, and total measures, and then hit Finish.

Here is what my lead sheet looks like just after creating it:

Remember, I have customized my title, composer, and lyricist fonts to use Comic Sans MS (bold for the title). If you decide you want to try some different fonts, you can right click the title and other fields, select Text Properties, and select whatever you like. If you own another notation program, it may have come with a text font that works well. I use the Jazz font that came with Finale in much of my own work. There are of course plenty of freely available fonts online as well. Some day, I hope MuseScore will provide its own appropriate font. Until then, however, realize that while you can use other fonts on your own system, if you choose a font that is not installed on other people's systems, then they will not be able to see your charts the same way you do. The same is true about the customizations made to the XML files.

Entering Notes

The process of entering notes for a lead sheet is not different than it is for any other type of score, so I will not dwell on it here. You can find some excellent tutorials at www.musescoretips.com. Also see www.musescore.org/en/handbook for general information on using MuseScore.

The basic process is this: click a measure, hit "N" to enter Note Input mode, and start typing. First press a number to control the duration of the note or rest to be entered, and then you press the letter corresponding to the note you want or "0" for a rest. Hit Ctrl-up/down to transpose the most recently entered note an octave, up/down to raise it or lower it a half step. Courtesy accidentals and unusual accidentals like C flat can be entered using the Accidentals palette or via a customized keyboard shortcut. There are plenty of other options for editing notes that you can learn about from the resources I listed above, but I wish to point out a couple of non-obvious things that come up often when putting together lead sheets.

The first is beaming an eighth to a sixteenth triplet. This is a common bebop idiom, but by default, MuseScore does not do this. So after entering the notes, you need to back up to the first note after the break you wish to remove, then open the Beam Properties palette and double-click the "Middle of beam" icon.

As it happens, the opposite situation happens a few bars later: MuseScore wants to beam some notes together that I do not. So this time, you select the note you want to come after the break and then double-click the "Start of beam" icon.

When I come to the end of the first eight-bar section of the tune, I like to place a double bar. You do this by selecting the barline, opening the Barlines palette, and double-clicking the "Double bar" icon.

In tunes with eight-bar sections like this, I normally like to lay them out four bars per line, but in this particular tune, MuseScore does not want to fit that many measures on a line by default. There are a number of ways to change this, including reducing the overall scaling of the document via Layout->Page Settings->Space. I purposely set the scale in my Jazz Lead Sheet template to be larger than the default because lead sheets are so often sight read in dimly lit bars

So before resorting to making things smaller, the first thing to try would be to simply squeeze the notes together a little closer. You do this by selecting the measures you wish to squeeze together and then hitting Layout->Add Less Stretch or the keyboard shortcut "{". In this case, I had to do that twice to compress things enough to get the first four measures onto the same line.

If you have the opposite problem - too many measures on a line - you can solve that by placing a line break on the measure you want to be last. You can do that either by dragging the "Line break" icon from the Breaks & Spacer palette onto the measure, or else selecting a barline and hitting Enter. I also like to use this approach just to "lock in" any changes I've made to layout through use of stretch, which was actually the case on both of the first two lines here.

Entering Chord Symbols

Because the second eight bars are going to be almost the same as the first eight, I am going to enter my chord symbols next, so that I can then simply copy and paste the first eight bars onto the next eight.

Assuming you like the style of chord symbols provide, or else you have customized your XML file to use the style you prefer, entering the chords is easy. Select a note or rest over which you would like a chord symbol to appear, hit Ctrl-K, and type your chord symbol normally.

You can then hit Esc to exit chord entry mode, or Space to move to the next note or rest. I generally stay in chord entry mode and just keep hitting Space, entering chords when I reach the right places.

There are two things that one might typically might need to deal with manually. One is the situation where two chords entered overlap each other. That happens in this measure:

In this particular case, I can see that the measure is unusually narrow compared to other measures, because it contains fewer notes, so I can try increasing the stretch in that measure. I keep increasing stretch until I can no longer fit all four measures on one line, then I back up one notch.

The two chords are still a little too close for comfort, so I double click the chord on the left and hit the left arrow a few times to nudge it over. During this process, the chord is displayed without the formatting provided by the XML file, so you cannot judge exactly how many times to hit the arrow key. Trial and error has to suffice.

The trickier problem that sometimes occurs with chord symbols is entering two (or more) of them in a measure that contains only a whole note or rest. There are a couple of different ways to do that. Probably the simplest way is to exit chord entry mode after entering the first, then select the note or rest it is placed over and hitting Ctrl-K again to enter a second chord. After typing the second chord but before hitting Esc or Space to leave it, you can hit the right arrow few times to nudge it over to where you want it.

The drawback of this approach is that the placement of the second chord really is trial and error, and it is likely to appear very wrong if the layout of the page subsequently changes. So I prefer a method that is a little more work up front, but more reliable in the long run. What I do is enter some notes in voice 2 and attach my chords to those.

Then I can delete those notes I added. The chords remain behind, firmly locked to the beat positions they were initially attached to.

This situation did not actually come up in this particular piece, but I thought it was important to cover it, since it does come up often in my experience.

Editing Operations

Most tunes that are written in lead sheet format have phrases that are repeated somewhere else within the form. As I mentioned previously, the second eight bars in my example are almost the same as the first. The last eight are also the same as the second. So I select the first eight bars, hit Ctrl-C to copy, then click on the next bar and hit Ctrl-V to paste.

As you can see, MuseScore did not preserve the stretches and breaks I had performed on the original eight bars, so I have to repeat those operations. But still, in almost no time at all, I have the second eight bars together.

Now I just need to replace the last two measures. I can select them and hit Del to remove the old notes.

Note that the chords are left behind, but I can re-enter those after I enter new notes

One issue comes up entering the new notes in this measure. There is a C flat at the beginning of the measure, and another in the next beat. Upon entering the second C flat, the flat sign displays even though it is not needed. The solution here is not obvious at all: enter the notes without the flats, then go back and add them in reverse order (right to left).

Since the last eight are the same as these second eight, I go ahead and get those done, and while I am at it, I enter line breaks so the third eight bars (the bridge) will be laid out four bars to a line. I also add the double bar at the end of the bridge. Note that the final double bar is added automatically by MuseScore.

Now I have everything but the bridge.

Slash Notation

As is the case with a few other bebop tunes, this particular composition does not actually have a written bridge - it is left open for improvisation. That means I will want to enter slash marks in each measure. To do this, I start by entering four quarter notes on the middle-line B in the first measure. I then select the four notes, right click, and select Note Properties. In the resulting dialog, I select Stemless, set Note Head Group to "slash", and just in case I decide to use the playback facility, I set the "velocity" of these notes to 0, after first setting "velocity type" to "user".

After hitting OK, I see that my measure has turned into four slash marks.

I can then copy and paste this measure to the rest of bridge, but MuseScore also provides a useful shortcut here. After copying and pasting the measure once, I can simply select the measure and hit "R" to repeat the measure again. Hitting "R" six times fills the rest of the bridge with slashes.

Now I can go back and add my chord symbols.

Final Touches

Looking over my chart, I notice a few places where I should add courtesy accidentals. Occasionally doing that causes a measure to grow to the point where I no longer fit four measures per line, so I simply select the measures and reduce stretch one more notch. After doing that, I noticed a wrong note or two, which I also fixed. The completed chart is included as an attachment.

Other Topics

I selected this particular composition for my example because it illustrates most of the issues one commonly encounters putting together a jazz lead sheet. A few other common issues do come up that we did not see in my example, though. So I will touch on these now using other examples.

Lyrics

Entering lyrics is easy. After entering your melody, just click on a note, hit Ctrl-L, and start typing.

MuseScore automatically moves to the next note any time you type a space or a hyphen. An underscore can be used on the second and subsequent notes of a tie to create a horizontal extender. The example above shows these on the words "small" and "yet".

Rhythmic Notation

In Bud-Like, we saw slash notation - stemless slashes used to show that a measure is open for improvisation. A related style of notation that is used often in lead sheets is sometimes called "rhythmic notation" - using slash-headed notes but with stems intact to show a particular accompaniment rhythm. The basic process for creating these is exactly like it is for slash notation, except you leave the Stemless option unchecked in the Note Properties. So you can enter a rhythm like this:

and then turn it into this:

What complicates this is the fact that often, we wish to have both ordinary notation and rhythmic notation on the same staff, to show melody and accompaniment together. You can do this by entering the melody and accompaniment in different voices. If you like to put your accompaniment rhythms above the staff, you may use voice 1, which defaults to having stems up, with the melody stems down in voice 2. Since I have already entered my accompaniment notes on the middle-line B, I select them all and hit the up arrow a few times to move them to just above the staff. I then go back to Note Properties and mark the notes Small. The stems will all be pointing down at first, but as soon as I enter notes into voice 2 for the melody, the stems in the accompaniment rhythms will point up automatically.

The stems on the accompaniment rhythms are longer than I would like, and the rest in the accompaniment is clashing with the melody, but I can double click on these elements and edit them.

Second Staves

Although lead sheets normally just contain one staff, sometimes it is necessary to split into two staves to notate a bass line or other part. I have provided a Jazz Lead Sheet 2 template that is set up this way. But if you have already begun work on a piece and then decide you need to add a staff, you can do this yourself by hitting "I" to bring up the Create Instruments dialog. and adding another instrument. Here, I am adding another Piano part, then deleting the treble clef staff from that part.

After hitting OK, you will see your staff has a name that you probably do not want displayed. So you will have to right-click the staff select Staff Properties, and delete both the Long and Short instrument names. You will also have to add the key signature by dragging it from the palette, and delete the curly brace at the start of the staff.

Now that you have a second part, you can enter your music there. Of course, some of your systems may need both staves, and some may need only one. Just leave the staves you don't need blank. In this example, you can see I am using both staves for the first system but only the top staff for the second system.

When you are done entering your music, you can enable Style->Edit General Style->Score->Hide empty staves. MuseScore will automatically hide any staves that contain no notes.

Other Markings

Many lead sheets use repeat signs, segno and coda signs, and various text markings to help direct the reader. Repeat signs can be dragged in from the Barlines palette; segno and coda signs from the Repeats palette. There are palette elements and/or shortcuts for common types of marking such as dynamics, rehearsal letters, and tempo markings. You can enter your own text markings by selecting a note or rest, hitting Ctrl-T, then typing your text. Afterward, you can drag your marking to place it more precisely.

Jazz charts also tend to make use of various articulations such as falls and "doits". The next version of MuseScore will contain support for more of these. In the current version, you can add these markings by creating graphic files in another program and then importing them via drag & drop. Or, you can try using the Symbols palette - the full version accessed by pressing "Z", not the abbreviated version that displays within the Palettes pane - and finding a symbol that comes close enough.

Transposing

If you write music to be played by wind instrument players, or to be sung by singers with different ranges, you will probably need to transpose your chart accordingly. The simplest way to transpose is to hit Ctrl-A to select all then Notes->Transpose. You can then select the new key or the interval to transpose by in the resulting dialog. Here, I am transposing up a major second, which is the transposition appropriate for Bb instruments like trumpet and tenor saxophone.

When creating versions for transposing instruments, I like to indicate that right on the lead sheet. I normally do this by double-clicking the style indication I had previously placed at top left, and inserting a line that reads "Bb version" in front of the style. The flat sign can be inserted within the text by hitting F2 to bring up the text symbol palette and then clicking the appropriate button.

Do note that a bug in MuseScore 1.0 means you will lose your courtesy accidentals when you transpose,so expect to spend a few moments re-adding them. Also, the flat sign inserted using the text symbol palette is on the small side. I would recommend selecting it and increasing the size using the controls at the bottom of the MuseScore screen.

There's a new update on the Open Goldberg Variations Kickstarter project detailing some of the new things coming to MuseScore as a result of the project. Werner and Thomas came to Cologne and met pianist Kimiko Ishizaka for the first time.

Bach's Goldberg Variations are a complex piece of music. The score has up to four voices per staff and makes heavy use of cross staff beaming. Some parts are also very dense and all this makes the Goldbergs a good test case for MuseScore. During the preparation of an initial version of the score I saw several defiencies and possible enhancements of MuseScore. This has influenced further development of MuseScore a lot.

Read more on the Kickstarter site (and see some pictures of Werner and Thomas!)

CSSMI, the Board of Education of La Seigneurie des Milles-îles in Canada, introduced on their blog a list of new software that became available on their computer network. Along with other free software, MuseScore was in the list as well. The blog post didn't reveal much so we contacted CSSMI to get some more details.

Jean-François Dupras replied to us saying "Oui effectivement, le logiciel MuseScore est maintenant disponible sur l'ensemble de nos 10,000 postes pédagogique". Thus MuseScore is now available on 10,000 computers across schools in the Milles-îles region in Quebec. This is terrific news and a great testimonial that MuseScore 1.0 is recognized as good and stable software for education.

We'd like to thank the APO-CSSMI team for this trust in MuseScore and spreading it towards their students.

We are proud to present MuseScore 1.1, our best and most stable release to date. Creating beautiful sheet music has never been so easy. MuseScore is free and open source notation software available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and translated in 43 languages.

Download MuseScore 1.1

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux

Read further to find out what's new.

What’s new

The main focus for version 1.1 has been on making MuseScore even more stable and reliable. More than 60 bugs have fixed. But if this isn’t enough to entice you to upgrade to MuseScore 1.1, then you might want to check out two fantastic new features. First, MuseScore has been greatly improved for making jazz lead sheets. Second, MuseScore is now connected with the community. It brings you the latest news, tips and tricks, and also sheet music for you to download directly into MuseScore.

Lead sheets

MuseScore 1.1 includes several new and enhanced features for working with lead sheets and other jazz charts. These include:

• New “Jazz Lead Sheet” template for great looking results right out of the box
• Enhanced MuseJazz font for use in titles and other text elements as well as in chord symbols
• Chord symbols can now be entered on beats that do not contain notes, allowing multiple chords to be entered in bars containing only a single note or rest
• Tab / Shift-Tab key during chord entry moves to next / previous measure
• New chord symbol style options, including triangle for major and circle with a slash for half-diminished
• New “Slash Notation Styles” plug-in available for download

Two extensive tutorials (basic & advanced) can help you master the art of making great lead sheets.

MuseScore Connect

If you carefully looked at the screen shot above, you might have spotted MuseScore Connect already at the right side. MuseScore Connect will bring you sheet music shared by MuseScore users on musescore.com, the latest news coming from Twitter, and video tutorials to get started with MuseScore. This is all coming from the growing MuseScore community.

What’s next

Two months from now, the MuseScore trunk will go into a feature freeze. This means that the development team will stop adding features and start working on stability and progressing toward the release of MuseScore 2.0. This release will mark a huge milestone for MuseScore, as it will appeal even more to both amateur and professional musicians.

MuseScore 2.0 will support tablature notation for fretted instruments such as guitar and lute, as well as import of Guitar Pro files. There will be linked parts for ensemble music, which automatically synchronize notes between the full score and the extracted parts while editing. There is much more, and it will all be logged in the scrapbook in the coming months.

Follow MuseScore on Twitter or Facebook to stay on top of the future developments!

With the release of MuseScore 1.1, there are a number of enhancements and new features that will be of interest to jazz musicians and others creating lead sheets. I have updated my tutorial on creating lead sheets to take advantage of these improvements. It is split into two parts: The Basics and Advanced Topics.

Below, I describe in some detail the changes to be found in MuseScore 1.1. But first, to whet your appetite, here is the chart I created for the advanced tutorial:

MuseJazz Font Enhancements

Previous versions of the MuseJazz font were limited to only the few characters used in one particular style of chord symbols. For MuseScore 1.1, the MuseJazz font has been enhanced to include not only a richer set of characters for chord symbols (eg, triangle for major chords, circle with a slash for half-diminished), but the full basic set of ASCII text characters as well, and even a few other music symbols like coda and segno. That means MuseJazz is now a viable font to use for titles and most other text markings in jazz charts - pretty much everything except the actual notes (some day, maybe; but that's actually controlled by a different font).

Improved Chord Symbol Entry

When entering chord symbols, the Space bar now advances to the next note, rest, or beat. This allows you to easily enter chords on beats that do not have a note or rest, meaning you can have two chords per measure even in bars that contain only a single note or rest. Also, the Tab key now advances to the next measure, allowing you to quickly enter one chord per measure even in passages containing a lot of notes.

New Chord Symbol Styles

Previous versions of MuseScore provided two different styles to control the appearance of chord symbols: stdchords.xml and jazzchords.xml. Customizing these files to render chord symbols according to your own personal preferences was possible but very difficult. In addition to the original two styles, MuseScore 1.1 now includes four additional styles: cchords_muse.xml. cchords_rb.xml, cchords_nrb.xml, and cchords_sym.xml. These are all built on a framework that will allow additional styles to be created more easily, and this framework allows you to easily customize things yourself if you like. Note that any such customizations cannot be shared with other MuseScore users, however, unless they also have the same customized XML files. The next major release of MuseScore (2.0) should contain further improvements in the area of customization this area, but for now, the availability of these four new styles should help a lot.

cchords_muse.xml is intended to be the new default for jazz charts. It has an appearance similar to the old jazzchords.xml ("ma" for major, "mi" for minor) but with a number of enhancements. Most notably, you now can use the same abbreviation when typing a chord symbol that will be used for display rather than having to remember to type "Maj" to get a chord that displays as "ma". The appearance of most of the chords has been improved as well. Some of these improvements have also been carried over into jazzchords.xml, but jazzchords.xml is mostly kept for compatibility.
As alternatives for people who wish to mimic the style of chord symbols used in the "Real Book" and "New Real Book", or who wish to use shapes instead of abbreviations, MuseScore 1.1 now provides new styles called cchords_rb.xml, cchords_nrb.xml, and cchords_sym.xml.

Here are samples of the results obtained from these files:

cchords_muse.xml (the default):

cchords_rb.xml:

cchords_nrb.xml:

cchords_sym.xml:

In addition, a few new chord symbols are now recognized by all of the different styles, including ma7#11, ma9#5, add2, mi7b9, mi7b13, and 7b9#9. There is also an improved version of the "Create Chord Chart" plugin that you can use to list all the possible chord symbols for any of these styles.

Note that since some of the existing characters had to be redefined in order to make MuseJazz work as a general text font, the "sym" declarations in any existing customized chord style XML files based on MuseJazz that you may have been relying on will have to updated to reflect these changes. Or - preferably - you may find that switching to one of the new chord symbol styles eliminates your need for the customizations.

New "Jazz Lead Sheet" Template and Style

To take advantage of the new cchords_muse.xml chord symbol style and the ability to use MuseJazz as a general purpose text font, a new "Jazz Lead Sheet" template has been provided that sets this up automatically. The overall layout of the template is also a better match for how lead sheets typically appear in fakebooks.

For those who prefer creating scores "from scratch" but still wish to take advantage of the new chord symbol styles and the ability to use MuseJazz as a general purpose text font, "Jazz Lead Sheet" is also available as an MSS file that can be loaded into an existing score. There is also a "MuseJazz" style that sets the chord name and text styles but does not alter any of your other general style settings.

Any of these methods are recommended over setting the Chordnames general style directly, because the "Jazz Lead Sheet" template and style also choose an appropriate font size for you, and they set MuseJazz to be used for other text elements as well. If you prefer to set the Chordnames general style manually, you may need to also change the font size in the Chordname text style. The jazzchords.xml style in MuseScore 1.0 created chords that were larger than they should have been according to the font size specified in the chordname text style. While this behavior is retained for compatibility, the new chord styles use the actual font size. So while the MuseScore default font size setting for chords worked well with jazzchords.xml, it does will not work as well with the new styles. The "Jazz Lead Sheet" template and style automatically select a font size appropriate for the new chord styles. If your score is created using this template, or with this style loaded, then you can freely change between any of the new chord styles.

Due to limitations in text handling in MuseScore 1.1 that will hopefully be addressed by version 2.0, loading a style into an existing score does not affect existing text elements - only text elements created after loading the syle. Also, a few types of text elements will continue to be created using MuseScore default fonts rather than the new MuseJazz characters. This includes any text used in voltas (endings) or in repeats (D.C al Fine, coda and segno, etc). You can manually change these markings to MuseJazz after creating them.

New "Slash Notation Styles" Plugin

Available for MuseScore 1.1 is a new "Slash Notation Styles" plugin that simplifies the process of creating the various styles of slash notation used in jazz. Ordinary slash notation is where measures are filled with one-per-beat slashes to indicate that they are open for improvisation or comping. Rhythmic notation is where slashes with stems, flags, and/or beams are used to indicate a specific comping rhythm. Accent notation is similar to rhythmic notation, but the notes are reduced in size and placed above the staff with stems pointing up, thus allowing you to show both the melody and the comping rhythm on the same staff (in different voices). Regardless of which style you wish to use in a given passage, you start by selecting the measures you wish to affect, and then you run the plugin. A dialog box appears to allow you to select which style to use, which voice to apply it to, and other parameters. For rhythmic and accent notation, you should have already entered ordinary notes representing the rhythm to be used; the plugin will move these notes to the appropriate location on the staff and turn them into slashes. For slash notation, any current content in the selected voice is deleted and replaced by one-per-beat slashes. All slashes created by the plugin are set to zero velocity (volume) so that they do not affect playback.

The “Slash Notation Styles” plugin is available here. After installing, you will find it in the Plugins->Lead Sheet submenu.

This plugin does not work with MuseScore 1.0, as it uses extensions to the plugin architecture that were not available prior to 1.1. Thanks, lasconic, for adding these extensions!

New "Add Staff" Plugin

Adding a staff to a lead sheet (eg, for a bass line) was admittedly not a particularly difficult task in 1.0. But considering that you would normally want that staff to display without a name in a lead sheet, and that you would need that staff to be a separate part so it could be hidden on systems where it was not being used, there were more steps involved in setting this up than I thought there needed to be. So I have provided the world's shortest plugin - a one-liner that adds a nameless part with a single staff to the current score - in order to streamline this process.

The “Add Staff” plugin is available here. After installing, you will find it in the Plugins->Lead Sheet submenu.

New "Explode" and "Implode" Plugins

The plugin architecture is not sophisticated enough to make these quite as powerful as one might hope, but they should still be useful for big band and similar arrangements. The idea is to take a series of chords of a certain number of notes representing a given horn section in a single staff and to convert it to individual lines in separate staves, and vice versa. To use the "Explode" plugin, create your voicings on the top staff of the section, then copy that passage to the other staves, then select them all and run the plugin to replace each with an individual line containing a single note from the chord. To use the "Implode" plugin, create your individual lines using the same rhythm, then select them all and run the plugin to add the notes from the lower staves to chords on the top staff.

The “Explode” and “Implode” plugins are available here.

New "Acoustic Bass" Instrument

The "Contrabass" and "Double Bass" instruments that have been available when setting up a score default to "arco" playback, requiring an explicit "pizz" staff text element to switch the sound. I have added an "Acoustic Bass" instrument that defaults to "pizz", which is more appropriate for jazz.

New Demo Charts

To show off some of these new features, I have provided two lead sheets in the "demos" folder of the distribution: All_Dudes.mscz and Triumph.mscz. The first is a catchy tune you should enjoy playing; the second is more challenging (but hopefully still enjoyable)!

MuseScore users might be interested in my new ebook – MuseScore: The Essential Beginner's Guide. It's available at a special launch price for 4 days.

The book contains step-by-step tutorials showing you how to publish, play and share your music. For more information, visit http://www.musescoretips.com/musescore-the-essential-beginners-guide/

25% of each sale will be donated back to the MuseScore project.

All the best
Katie

For anyone interested, I've just finished creating MuseScore versions of 50+ of my jazz compositions. It's something I've been working on in the background for the last few months ever since 1.1 came out, but I decided to really accelerate the process the couple of weeks. I've been uploading them to musescore.com as I go, so here is a link to the full set:

http://musescore.com/marcsabatella/sets/leadsheets

I also wrote up a blog article on the experience.

I thought these might prove useful as models for people wondering how to do various things in MuseScore. If it's something that you'd want to do in a lead sheet, chances are, it came up for me at some point. Really, most of what is there is covered in the tutorials I had put together when 1.1 was released, but sometimes it helps to see more examples of what can be done. If you want to know how something was done that isn't covered in the tutorials and that you can't figure out from examining the file in MuseScore, just ask (maybe start a new thread in the Support forum).

Here's a sample page:

Our last news update is already from a couple of months ago with the maintenance release of MuseScore 1.1. It has been a successful release with more than half a million downloads and counting. Something we are very proud of. Since then some of our attention has shifted to the next major release, MuseScore 2.0, to make it the best release ever. To join this effort, check out the MuseScore nightly builds and report bugs in the issue tracker. Another part of our attention went to something else, something mobile.
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A while back, Werner kicked off the development of MuseScore for mobile devices with a post on the developer mailing list:
"The initial goal would be to display and playback MuseScore scores on mobile devices, so we are not talking about creating sheet music. With iOS devices dominating the mobile market, we will first be looking at iOS and afterwards moving up to Android, Windows Phone 7 and other platforms."

All I want for Christmas

Today, we are proud to show you the first glimpse of a MuseScore Player for iOS. For the occasion, Werner created Christmas app for iPad holding 50 scores he typeset. The app comes with several features: display of the scores, playback, tempo change, font resize with reflow and transpose. There is still some work to do on transpose, but this app proves to be pretty stable and we are very happy with the result. The app is now available in the app store.

We called the app the Ultimate Christmas Songbook, because we would like to see it become the largest collection of public domain Christmas sheet music. So we welcome everyone to contribute songs to the group on MuseScore.com. If you are new to MuseScore.com, here are the instructions to join this cause. Every contributor will get a coupon to download the app for free. One note: only public domain scores will be accepted, so mark your uploaded songs as public domain.

Demo time

Developers

This app is made with open source software which you can find in the MuseScore code repository under the directory libmscore. So developers, if you want to make your own app with this library, feel free to contact us on the developer mailing list, on IRC, or just leave a message via the contact form.

What's next?

This app is made for iPad but Werner and Lasconic are working hard to make it available for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android as well. Here is a screenshot from the MuseScore Player for Android in development.

As soon as the MuseScore Player successfully runs on iOS and Android, we can start the development of a player app, which is connected to your MuseScore.com account. Thus, your sheet music experience will become completely digital: create your scores with MuseScore, upload & share them on MuseScore.com and finally have them with you all the time on your mobile device.

All of this is previewed for the spring of 2012. Also scheduled for next year is the release of MuseScore 2.0 so there is a lot to look forward to. It will be a splendid year. Happy holidays!

A week ago, I was at FOSDEM with Thomas and Werner to promote MuseScore to fellow developers, to new users, and to husbands, fathers of new users. Here are some photos.

It was a great opportunity to discuss the future of MuseScore and the remaining work to release MuseScore 2.0. I sat down with Werner and we came out with a MuseScore 2.0 roadmap. The list is probably incomplete, and will move but at least we now have a list on paper! We will extend the list, prioritize items etc... This list is a basis for further work. If you spot a missing item in the list, please report it.

One of the purpose of this list is to be able to locate features that are still under heavy development. These features don't need testing just now but as a tester, your opinion about the interface, the importance of the feature etc... is very valuable. You can post your feedback in the Technology Preview forum

The list also contains, and will hopefully contain more and more, completed features. As a tester, please test this features in priority and submit bugs in the issue tracker. If you are not sure if it's a bug or expected behavior, you can discuss it in the Technology Preview forum.

Happy testing!

We are proud to present MuseScore 1.2, our best and most stable release to date. In the past 8 months, MuseScore 1.1 has been downloaded nearly one million times in more than 200 countries! It’s a tremendous testimonial how a niche open source software project driven by a passionate group of musicians and software developers is affecting musicians' lives all over the world.

Download MuseScore 1.2

• Windows XP, Vista, 7 & Portable release
• Mac OS X 10.6+ Intel
• Linux
  • openSUSE
  • Arch Linux
  • Fedora
  • Ubuntu

What’s new

MuseScore 1.2 includes nearly 100 bug fixes, mainly in MusicXML import and export, notation, user interface, playback, styling and parts. With the much improved MusicXML support, you can now reliably import your sheet music collection from Sibelius or Finale into MuseScore.

A lot of effort went again into localizing MuseScore 1.2. The MuseJazz font has been extended tremendously for international alphabets. There are new translations for Estonian and Belarusian, and updates for the other 43 translations.

We also said goodbye to Moussorgsky’s Picture of an Exhibition, which has served us well as the MuseScore demo score for many years now. We found a worthy replacement in Marc Sabatella’s Reunion, which was composed specifically for MuseScore.

Last but not least, MuseScore Connect – which was introduced in version 1.1 – has been completely rebuilt. You can now search for sheet music shared by the community on musescore.com as well as search through your own collection and open scores directly into MuseScore. But this is just the start. From now on, MuseScore Connect will improve independently from the MuseScore releases.

Read more about 1.2 in the release notes.

The road to MuseScore 2.0

Version 1.2 was the last release in the 1.x series. From today on, we shift our focus entirely to MuseScore 2.0, and if you have a peek at the roadmap, you will understand that this release will be huge! To make this release rock, MuseScore and its developer team will need your help.

As the code contributor community of MuseScore is growing, we want a better way for developers to collaborate. We follow the move many other open source projects have made over the past years, by transferring the MuseScore code repository from SVN to GIT. So if you are building MuseScore, contributing patches or committing code, make sure you have read Nicolas’ post on the GIT migration.

If you are not into coding, but you rather like to help testing the newest features, the right place to start is the roadmap. Major new features such as linked parts, tablature, fret diagrams, figured bass, scroll view, repitch mode, custom palettes, quarter tone accidentals, more flexible time signatures, and more powerful text styling, will need serious testing. Your feedback is very welcome in the Technology Preview forum. Precise bug reports can be directly posted in the issue tracker.

In parallel with the feature testing, two more initiatives will need support: automated regression testing and the 2.0 handbook. More information on this will be posted as soon as GIT migration is finished.

Follow & support

Stay updated on all the MuseScore news via Facebook, Twitter, or the newsletter. If you would like to support MuseScore, you can always make a donation so we can grow the server that hosts the musescore.org site along with the growing MuseScore community. But above all, you can help MuseScore most by spreading the word and sharing MuseScore with your friends and family!

Now let's celebrate this release and listen to the new MuseScore demo song.

MuseScore passed 3 million downloads today, starting the counter 4 years ago. This would never had happened without the work and dedication of hundreds of MuseScore contributors, all passionate to make great music notation software and free for everyone. Congrats!

Source: SourceForge.net.

MuseScore has been downloaded in more than 200 countries.

With 3,000,000 people having downloaded MuseScore, I imagine there must be quite a few of us doing interesting things with it. From newcomers to music software writing their first compositions, to hobbyists looking for a better, easier, and/or cheaper way to notate their music, to professional musicians, educators, and composers creating works for performance and even publication - I expect MuseScore is being used for all these things and more.

So how about it? Let's hear your stories!

Good news! We've set the release date of the digital OpenGoldberg score on May 28th. For those who are not familiar with the OpenGoldberg project, you can learn all about it at http://kck.st/opengoldberg This project has been a great way for us to push the development of MuseScore.

On the one side there was the making of the Goldberg Variations score for which Werner used the development snapshot of the upcoming MuseScore 2.0. Since typesetting this score was very challenging, Werner improved MuseScore on various aspects.

OpenGoldberg app for iPad

On the other side, Nicolas has been quietly developing an iPad app for the OpenGoldberg project, featuring the score as well as the recording, playing in sync. We used the development of this app as a springboard towards the MuseScore Player app which is coming closer now.

The iPad app will be free and the release date is set to May 28th. We have been testing the app successfully on iPad 1 & 2, but we are still seeking people with an iPad 3. Please leave a comment if you have an iPad 3 and would like to help us testing the app.

Teaser

Goldberg Variations by OpenGoldberg

Before explaining the new plugin framework, let's define what problems we faced with the plugin subsystem in MuseScore 1.2.

One problem is the binding to the qt library. The code to enable this is very huge and consists of > 1100 files with > 297000 lines of code. This is not maintainable for the MuseScore team. It seems that qt does not maintain this anymore and it will not be available for the next major Qt version.

Another problem is that the MuseScore class hierarchy cannot be exposed easily to the current JavaScript engine. Every MuseScore class must be wrapped by a special proxy class. This also is a big maintenance issue and makes it difficult and expensive to make more elements of MuseScore available for scripting.

New QML based framework

After some hacking and testing i want to come up with a new solution: using the Qt qml system to make MuseScore scriptable.

Qml is a declarative language with the syntax of JavaScript which can contain java script parts which are executed on gui events. Without any further bindings Qml contains all to create modern dynamic guis.

The most important point is that the needed bindings to MuseScore internals are much easier. It is possible to expose the original class hierarchy of MuseScore to the scripting engine.

Caveats are that the new system has some overhead as all score elements now inherit from QObject and incorporate the Qt meta object system.

I hope the new system can offer the same functionality than the old plugin system so that porting of existing plugins is easy. Otherwise its a chance to think again on how the interface can be designed to implement simple things as easy as possible. One of the design goals should be that it should not be possible to crash MuseScore with scripting and it should be not possible to create corrupted scores.

The first version of the new plugin system is available for testing in the nightly builds.

//===============================================================
//      "colornotes" example in qml:
//===============================================================

import QtQuick 1.0
import MuseScore 1.0

MuseScore {
       menuPath: "Plugins.colornotes"

       onRun: {
             console.log("hello colornotes");

             var colors = [
                "#e21c48", "#f26622", "#f99d1c",
                "#ffcc33", "#fff32b", "#bcd85f",
                "#62bc47", "#009c95", "#0071bb",
                "#5e50a1", "#8d5ba6", "#cf3e96"
                ];

             if (typeof curScore === 'undefined')
                   return;
             var cursor = curScore.newCursor();
             for (var track = 0; track < curScore.ntracks; ++track) {
                   cursor.track = track;
                   cursor.rewind(0);  // set cursor to first chord/rest

                   while (cursor.segment) {
                         if (cursor.element && cursor.element.type == MScore.CHORD) {
                               var notes = cursor.element.notes;
                               for (var i = 0; i < notes.length; i++) {
                                     var note = notes[i];
                                     note.color = colors[note.pitch % 12];
                                     }
                               }
                         cursor.next();
                         }
                   }
             Qt.quit()
             }
       }

//========================================
// the "old" java script version:
//========================================

var colors = [new QColor(226,28,72),new QColor(242,102,34),new
QColor(249,157,28),
new QColor(255,204,51),new QColor(255,243,43),new QColor(188,216,95),
new QColor(98,188,71),new QColor(0,156,149),new QColor(0,113,187),
new QColor(94,80,161),new QColor(141,91,166),new QColor(207,62,150)];

function init()
       {
       }

function run()
       {
       if (typeof curScore === 'undefined')
             return;
       var cursor = new Cursor(curScore);
       for (var staff = 0; staff < curScore.staves; ++staff) {
             cursor.staff = staff;
             for (var v = 0; v < 4; v++) {
                   cursor.voice = v;
                   cursor.rewind();  // set cursor to first chord/rest

                   while (!cursor.eos()) {
                         if (cursor.isChord()) {
                               var chord = cursor.chord();
                               var n     = chord.notes;
                               for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
                                     var note   = chord.note(i);
                                     note.color = new QColor(colors[note.pitch % 12]);
                                     }
                               }
                         cursor.next();
                         }
                   }
             }
       }

var mscorePlugin = {
       menu: 'Plugins.Color Notes',
       init: init,
       run:  run
       };

mscorePlugin;
#----------------------------------------------

...well, almost!

First of all, a nightly version 74b4a45 (2012-09-01) or later is required. Currently, such a nightly is only available for Mac but it should be available for Linux soon and for Windows as soon as Win nightlies will be resumed. A self-compiled version from Github can also be used, of course!

Changes:

1) During note entry in TAB staves, the entry cursor (the 'blue rectangle' cursor) does not span the whole staff vertically as for other staves, but only one string: this is the current string. Initially, the current string is the string of the selected note, if any, or the topmost string if no note is selected.

2) Two shortcuts have been added: one to make current the string above ('blue rectangle' goes up) and one to make current the string below ('blue rectangle' goes down).

3) 10 other shortcuts have been added to enter a fret mark 0 to 9 on the current string. More shortcuts (10 to 19 or even 10 to 29) will be added once the system is proven correct and stable enough. For the moment being, these should cover the majority of cases; ShiftUp can always be used to raise the note without changing string.

4) Shortcuts removed. A number of shortcuts have been removed while in TAB note entry; all those referring to absolute pitches (like "A" or "Add A to chord") and to intervals (like "Add a fifth"), as they make little sense while working on a TAB. Of course, those shortcuts ARE still available in other staff types.

5) Actual shortcuts. I had to choose the new predefined shortcuts among the few combination still available (mostly Alt combinations) and the result is somehow awkward. These are the default:

AltUp: current string above
AltDown: current string below

Alt0: enter fret 0 (or 'a' if letters are used)
...
Alt9: enter fret 9 (of 'k' if letters are used)

As an alternative, AltA to AltK are also set to enter frets (same meaning as above: i.e. either numbers or letters can be used to enter, and frets will be displayed as numbers or as letters according to TAB properties). Unfortunately, AltC, AltD, AltE and AltF are intercepted by the operating system to display the "Create", "Display", "Edit" and "File" menus respectively, so these combinations are not actually available! (This applies to the English version; for other languages, any letter which happens to be used for a menu will not be available).

6) All shortcuts are configurable as usual.

Note on first time usage
After running the nightly with this update, you may need to reset all shortcut customizations or the new shortcuts will have no predefined value (they will there but without any key associated). To reset them:
"Edit | Preferences | "Reset to default" (the one near to "Clear", not the general "Reset")
It is inconvenient, I know, but it is one of the drawbacks of working with an experimental version...
OR: you can enter your own key combinations for those shortcuts as usual.

Feedback requests

1) Does the whole work as described above?
2) Has some special case been left out?
3) Can shortcut defaults be improved?
4) Suggestions for the additional shortcuts.

Thanks,

M.

Hello everyone,
My name's Mark Johnson and I work for OSS Watch, an open source advisory service for UK education based at the University of Oxford.

We're currently compiling a list of Open Source Options for Education - open source options for educational establishments where proprietary software might otherwise be considered.

MuseScore is on our list, but as part of the list we'd like to include examples of real-world usage where possible.

If you're currently using MuseScore in an educational context and are happy for us to use you as an example, please reply to this message letting me know where you're from with any information you're willing to provide about your MuseScore usage (or a link to some information online if any exists) and we'll mention it in the final document.

Thanks!

The 2013 edition of Google Summer of Code has been announced. It's a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects, and getting paid for it. Read all about it on the GSoC website.

We are going to submit MuseScore again for this edition as we did for previous years. If you have an idea for a summer project, please don't hesitate to post it on our ideas page for 2013. A good GSoC idea is something which can be implemented in 3 months and optionally has a high impact on the MuseScore user experience.

Looking forward to hear about your ideas.

We are happy to announce the release of MuseScore 1.3. It's our best and most stable release to date, fixing several critical bugs - including one which resulted in distorted sound playback for many users. MuseScore is now also available as an MSI package, which makes it simpler to install on multiple Windows machines at once - ideal for system administrators of school networks.

Download MuseScore 1.3

• Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8
• MSI package
• Mac OS X 10.6+ Intel
• Linux
• OpenSUSE

Read the MuseScore 1.3 release notes.

A look ahead

When releasing a new version, you might be curious already about what's coming next, but first, let us look back.

We released MuseScore 1.2 less than one year ago. Since then version 1.2 has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times in more than 200 countries. We hear from many sources that MuseScore is steadily becoming a household name in music education worldwide. Keep in mind that less than 5 years ago, we launched musescore.org to create a home for the MuseScore community. The success of MuseScore today is thanks to all those who have contributed to MuseScore and evangelized it among their friends and peers. It can't be said enough: Thank you all!

So what's ahead of us? Well, MuseScore 2.0 will be the next release. If you like to know what new features it will bring, take a look at the 2.0 roadmap. We invite everyone to join in testing the new features and give feedback in the Technology Preview forum. The more test feedback the MuseScore developers receive, the faster MuseScore 2.0 can be released. Everyone is welcome to join, from starters to expert users.

Follow & support

Stay updated on all the MuseScore news via the newsletter, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If you would like to support MuseScore, you can always make a donation so we can grow the server that hosts the musescore.org site along with the MuseScore community. But above all, you can help MuseScore most by spreading the word and sharing MuseScore with your friends and family!