John's Quick & Dirty Beginner's MuseScore CheatSheet

• Apr 20, 2011 - 01:33

Here's a collection of stuff picked up along my schlep up the learning curve. My hope is that with your additions and corrections, it can become a useful starting point for new users.

-- J.S.

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John's Quick and Dirty Beginner's
MuseScore CheatSheet

This is mostly about entering and editing music. It assumes you have the program installed, and set up

a score.

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4-19-11
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Entering New Notes: Click on the "N" symbol on one of the top rows, then on the duration you want.

Always check the duration, because each time you click on the "N", it pops to some random duration. If

you want a dotted duration, also click on the dot or dots. Click wherever you want notes of that

duration in the score. For chords, just click in more note heads vertically in a column. The only

limitation is that as you replace rests with notes, you can only enter a note at the start of the

rest's duration. So, within each new measure, do first things first.

You can also enter notes of new durations over existing notes. MuseScore always overwrites, it never

inserts, when entering notes. You can insert blank measures, though.

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Accidentals: When entering new notes, click on the top row accidental immediately after placing the

note. To put one on an existing note, you can single click select the note and then click on the top

row accidental. Use the side palette if you want to choose the accidental first and drag it to the

note. Be sure you see the note head turn red before you let go, confirming which one gets it.

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Inserting new blank measures: Select the measure *after* where you want the new ones. Then click on

the menu "Create/Measures/Insert Measures".

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Copy and paste is your best friend: Often you have several measures, or sequences of measures, with

the same durations for all the notes, but different pitches. So, enter one measure or sequence, copy

it, and paste it wherever you have matching durations.

Click the first measure, Shift-Click the last measure, Right Click, and select copy. Click the target

measure, Right Click, and Paste.

Then it's very quick and easy to click and drag the notes to the right pitches. This lets you lay in a

melody line about as fast as you could write it with paper and pencil. Then be sure to play back the

melody by itself. It's easier to catch mistakes that way.

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Undo is another friend and teacher: Experiment, try stuff, you can always hit "Undo". Save your file

first, and no matter how bad you mess up, you can just exit discarding changes, no harm done.

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Moving Around: Click on a blank place and drag to move the score around in the window. It's easy to

get sloppy doing multiple click and drags, and accidentally make some random change in the score.

Resist the temptation to fix it by hand, just let go and click on "Undo". That way, there's no risk of

introducing a mistake.

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Magnification: When you change the size of the region in the window, say from 75% to 400%, it's the

upper right corner that stays constant. So, first click and drag to get the detail you want in the

upper right.

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General Principle: Try clicking on stuff, and double clicking on stuff. This gets you into different

edit modes.
In general, a single click selects things, and lets you drag them around to position them cosmetically.

I especially like this for lead sheets. Shifting long chord symbols vertically keeps them from running

into each other.

A right click after a single click selection often brings up a useful menu.

Double clicking often gets you handles with which to modify the shapes of things. This is especially

nice for giving more bend to slurs, so they don't cross over the stems of flats and such.

Sometimes things can be dragged from a palette to a note without selecting the note first. In that

case, be sure that you see the note head turn red before you release the mouse button. That's what

indicates which one will be affected. If there's no red note, nothing happens.

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Problem: It looks right, but it sounds wrong.

Solution: MuseScore has to keep track of a little extra data for the computer to be able to play your

score. Things like slurs, hairpins, alternate endings, etc. can be clicked and dragged and stretched

and squished to make them look the way you want. Doing that can make them look like they apply to

different parts of the score than the program thinks they do.

If you double click and drag an end handle of the problematic item just a little, MuseScore will

display a dashed line from it to the note to which it applies. In general, use the arrow keys with

Control and Shift together instead of the mouse to move the note end of the dashed line. You may have

to click on a handle to activate the right one first. Try the arrows by themselves, and with Shift,

Control and/or Alt, to see what does what with the item you're editing.

Slurs and ties look the same, but sound different. Try moving one note head up or down. If it goes by

itself, you have a slur. If both move, it's a tie. If you have the wrong kind, delete it and put in

the right one.

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Beams: MuseScore's automatic beams generally work quite well. If you want everything flagged instead,

as is traditional for vocal lines, select all the measures containing beamed notes, and double click on

the flagged note on the "Beams" palette. To convert just one note, you can also click and drag the

flagged note from the palette to it. Don't let go until the target note head turns red.

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Slur: Drag it from the "Lines" palette to the first note, then adjust the end with

"Control-Shift-RightArrow".

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Tie: Select the first note, hit "+"

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Vertical Flipping for Slurs, Ties, Stems, etc.: Select and just hit "x".
Horizontal Flipping for Note Heads: Select and Shift-"x".

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Tuplets: Enter and select a note that has the duration of the whole tuplet group, like a quarter note

for a triplet of eighths. From the main menu, select Notes/Tuplets/Triplet. Then specify pitches.

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Voices: To create chords in which notes have different durations, MuseScore uses a different Voice for

each duration. By default, notes are entered in Voice #1 (blue). So, do the voice #1 notes first,

then click on the number 2 with the green background just above the score to enter notes in voice #2,

and so forth. This tends to clutter things up with rests in voices 2, 3, and 4, so click on those

rests and then right click for a menu and make them invisible.

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Problem: Note heads of different voices overwrite each other (like F&G on the same side of the stem).

Solution: Double click on one of the note heads and use the left / right arrow keys to move it. Click

somewhere else when you're done. The stem, flag, beam, etc. will follow. Click on the next note, then

right click, and in note properties, give it perhaps 0.5 additional leading space, whatever looks good.

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Cross Staff Beams: In Grand Staff notation, you can replace an inconveniently large run of ledger

lines with the same note moved to the other staff. Enter it with the ledgers, then single click select

it, and hit Control-Shift-Down to force it to the bass staff, or Control-Shift-Up to force it to the

treble staff.

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Playback: Be sure to check out the "Mixer" -- it lets you solo staves. It's easy to click and drag

notes heads to different pitches, but the down side is, it's also easy to make mistakes. Finding them

by ear is easier for me than proofreading the score, and the solo feature helps to isolate them.

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Comments

John - I'm just beginning with MuseScore and your Tips are not only most helpful but are also damned hard to find (or find out) otherwise. I appreciate the time and effort you've taken to put this all together - many thanks!
I copied the whole lot to a Word Doc, and in 'Word' used the "Backspace" key to make it look the way it should, enlarged and emboldened topic headings then highlighted the tips and cut-and-pasted them into alphabetical order to make them easier to find. Then I "c&p'd" the bold heading words to the top in order as an index. Then I saved it under your name. I'm going to find out how to do things, and if you have any more tips I'd love to get them and compile a BEGINNERS' MANUAL. With a bit of luck I might even come up with something that's a help to you! Or others.
Again - THANKS JOHN.
Mike Gallagher

In reply to by MIKE G

Thanks, Mike -- The order in which I listed things might seem random, but I did have reasons for some of it. I started with Note Entry, because that's what most users would need first. Accidentals come right after note entry, because that's what you might need next. The Problem/Solution entries come right after the things that cause those problems, etc....

My hope is to keep it brief enough to be worth reading from end to end. After the scope of it stabilizes, it would certainly be a good idea to number the entries, and make an alphabetical index.

-- J.S.

I agree, this is a nice list, covering most of the topics a newcomer would need to see. Definitely the sort of thing we can use more of! But some observations:

- N shouldn't default to "some random" value; it's always "5" (quarter note / crotchet). At least, that's what I find.

- Clicking is the least efficient method of entering notes. MuseScore allows you to enter the music using the computer keyboard alone (eg, type "B", get a "B"; shift-"B" to add a B to the currently selected chord), or in conjunction with a MIDI keyboard. Either method is *much* faster than clicking notes on the screen. A cheat sheet should *definitely* highlight this.

- Tuplets also are very easily entered using the keyboard - Ctrl-3 after selecting a note to enter a triplet, for instance.

- Accidentals: clicking the accidental symbol is not the right way to enter most accidentals. Instead, you should use the arrow keys to move a note up or down. The accidentals on the palette are for cases where you want to override something - like put a courtesy sharp sign in front of a note that is already sharp because of the key signature but was cancelled in the previous measure. And these can also be entered using the keyboard. Here, though, I'm not just talking abut what is more efficient - there are actually differences in how MuseScore deals with accidentals depending on whether they were entered using the arrow keys versus the palette, and the arrow key method is the right one most of the time. The differences show up in cases where you transpose the line, for instance.

- Some other things in your list are more efficiently done with the keyboard as well, although now we're getting into the question of how many shortcuts do you want to remember, A slur can be placed by pressing "S", for instance. Also, you don't need the "ctrl" to extend it - just shift-arrow does the trick. Similarly, there are keyboard shortcuts to break and join beams, etc. Most shortcuts are customizable if that helps make them easier to remember. I say this not because I expect everyone will want to use keyboard entry as much as I do, but if you're producing a cheat sheet, it's worth mentioning these things for the sake of those who will find it useful. I know if I saw a cheat sheet that told me I had to click all the time, I'd probably assume the software wasn't very efficient and would look elsewhere. But conversely, a cheat sheet that only talked about memorizing a long list of keyboard shortcuts isn't very friendly either. Ideally, brief mention of both options.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks, Marc -- I'll definitely try out all the keyboard shortcuts you recommend, and update the text. Rather than dump it all inline again, I'll try to post it as an attachment. Would a doc file be better than txt?

I know for sure that I've had the big "N" default to eighth, quarter, half, and whole, seemingly at random. It hasn't gone to the shorter durations, but so far, neither have I. Why it does what it does is probably too deep an issue for this brief cheat sheet. I'm on a PC with Windows XP, perhaps you're using something different.

-- J.S.

In reply to by John Sprung

Hi John,

It would make a nice experiment if you could create a Google Doc of you cheat sheet and then make it open so anyone can edit it, place comments, etc. Since all revisions will be stored by Google, you'll be able to see who changed what.

In reply to by John Sprung

Very nice! One more general observation about using the mouse: most items on the palette that can be placed by drag&drop - like slurs or articulations - can also be placed by selecting the note they are to attach to and then double clicking the palette. That's usually more efficient than dragging. But a few things can only be placed by drag&drop.

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