Creating multiple 1-2-measure phrases for teaching

• Sep 11, 2012 - 14:23

Hello: I am attempting to use MuseScore for making "flashcards" of musical phrases to quiz my piano students. These would be extremely short (1-2 measures) examples of grand staff phrases for them to quickly recognize and play. I may want to include some of these in instructional essays I intend to write, as well. One idea I had was to create the phrase (no titles or heading) and try to save it as a .jpg or .gif file so that it could be used as an image. I don't know how to do this but I thought it was worth a try. Does anyone have an idea that would make this more feasible? I would like to stay away from using scissors and paste to accomplish it. Thank you, ever so much! JHJ


Comments

There are lots of ways of doing this sort of thing. MuseScore *can* save your score as a graphics file (File / Save As, choose a graphics format - PNG is best for things like this), which you can then edit in your favorite graphics editor. Or you can install and run the Snippet Creator plguin, which saves the score as a PNG and automatically trims out the excess white space, saving the need to trim it in an editor. Either way, the resulting PNG file can then be inserted into a word processor.

If you're doing this sort of thing a lot - like writing a book - you might appreciate even further automation. That's why I developed the MuseScore Extension Manager for LibreOffice, which automates the whole shebang. From LibreOffice, you select a score to insert, and the extension automatically generates the graphic, trims it to size, inserts it, and adds a hyperlink back to the original score so if you decide to edit it later, it's only a ctrl-click away.

I would not go into the complication of using the Snippet creator or the excellent openoffice plugin for a simple and big flashcard

  1. Create a new score with a simple instrument such as flute
  2. Go to layout -> Page settings and select your page size
  3. Delete the measure you don't need. Click on the first one, shift click on the last one and go to Edit -> Delete selected measure.
  4. Delete the instrument name. Select them and press Del on your keyboard
  5. Enter a couple of measure. See Note Entry
  6. If the music is too small, go to layout -> Page settings and increase the scale.
  7. If you need more text, use a staff text. select a note, Ctrl + T and enter some text, you can position it by dragging it.

Here is a sample flash card in A4 format: http://musescore.com/nicolas/scores/3649

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

Agreed, if you are OK with making the whole flash card in MuseScore, that's the easiest way to solve that part of the problem. You can even save one as a template to quickly make a bunch of them. It was more for the idea that you might also want to include examples within text documents that something like the Snippet Creator or Example Manager makes sense for.

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