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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 have set up a score.

I hope to keep it short enough to be worth reading from beginning to end.  Topics are arranged in a somewhat reasonable order, and I plan to number them and make an alphabetical index once the contents are stable enough.  

MuseScore can be used with the mouse, the computer keyboard, and/or a MIDI keyboard.  I don't have a MIDI keyboard, so all keyboard references here are to the alphanumeric computer kind.  Maybe some day I'll be able to add a MIDI appendix....   


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4-20-11
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Entering New Notes:  Click on the "N" symbol on one of the top row palettes, or hit "N" on the keyboard to toggle in and out of note entry mode.  ("ESC" on the keyboard exits note entry mode.)  Then select the duration you want, by clicking a note to the right of the "N", or hitting a top row number key.  Always check the duration, because each time you type or click "N", it pops to some random duration.  If you want a dotted duration, also click on the dot or dots, or hit the period.  

Mouse:  Click wherever you want notes of that duration in the score.  For chords, just click in more note heads vertically in a column.   

Keyboard:  The letter keys A through G enter the notes A through G.  Hold Control and hit the up or down arrows to move up or down an octave at a time.  For chords, hold the Shift key and add more notes. During keyboard entry, a thick vertical blue line shows where you are on the staff. 

You can also enter notes of new durations over existing notes or rests.  MuseScore always overwrites, it never inserts, when entering notes.  You can insert blank measures, though. 

The only limitation is that as you replace rests or notes, you can only enter a new note at the start of an old duration.  So, within each new measure, do first things first.
 
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Accidentals:  When entering new notes, hit the up or down arrow key immediately after placing the note. To put one on an existing note, single click select it, and hit the up or down arrow. You can hit the arrows as many times as you like, and move notes as far as you want.  It always uses single sharps,  single flats, or naturals.  Double sharps and flats are available on the palettes.  Also, use the side palette for parenthentical courtesy sharps and flats.    

You can also place accidentals with the mouse, but there's a report that ones done that way don't always transpose correctly.  Place a new note or select an existing one, 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:  Select the first note and hit "S", or drag a slur from the "Lines" palette to the first note, then adjust the end with "Shift-RightArrow".

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Tie:  Select the first note, and hit "+", or click the "+" with the quarter note and slur on the top palette, right after the durations and dots.

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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, you could select Notes/Tuplets/Triplet, or hit Control-3 on the keyboard.  All the numbers from Control-2 through Control-9 work.  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, 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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