Hey guys, in this video we’re going to take a look at how to use musescore.
Musescore is a completely free program to create professional sheet music.
We’ll cover how to get started by creating a score, inputting music with the different
program features, and finally exporting our music into a format that can be easily distributed.
When we first open the program, we’ll get the menu to create a new score.
Click create a new score and then we’ll have a few things to change to customize how
our score looks.
The first section is all the information about the title, composer, and copyright.
Just put in whatever text you want for each of those for your project.
It is possible to change these at a later time if necessary.
Next we’ll chose how our score is laid out.
I’ll just use a simple treble clef to get started.
Later we’ll go over how we can change this and add multiple instruments to our score.
I’ll keep my project in the key of C and we’ll use a 4/4 time signature.
Now we have our score setup.
There’s a few things to go over first.
To move the score around on the screen, click and drag one of the blank areas.
Using the scroll wheel on your mouse moves the page up and down.
To zoom in and out, use the scroll wheel while holding down the control key on your keyboard.
Now we’ll start actually adding notes to our score.
To do this, we need to switch to the note input mode.
This is found on the top menu at the far left, and you can also toggle this mode by pressing
the N key.
Next choose the note duration from the top menu.
You can also switch these with the 1-9 keys on the keyboard.
We’ll start off using eighth notes.
One of the nice features of musescore is you can actually hear all the notes as you input
them.
It will also automatically add any rest notes to complete the measure.
After we’ve input a few of these eighth notes, we’ll switch and add quarter notes.
Then we’ll finish off with a whole note.
As you can see we have a few extra measures at the end of the score that we can remove.
To get rid of these, first exit the note input mode.
Then click on the first measure, hold down the shift key, then click on the last measure
to select the ones you want to remove.
Press control and the delete key to remove these measures.
If you want to tie notes together, there’s also a tool to do that.
That combines the same notes telling the musician, and in this case musescore, to play the note
for the duration of both the tied notes.
Select the note you want to tie, and press the tie button in the top menu, or press the
plus key on the numpad.
The tie tool only ties to the next note right after it.
To tie more notes, just select the next note and tie it again.
Next to the ties, we have options for augmentation.
For example, if we add this to a note worth two beats in 4/4 timing, it increases it by
half of its original length, making it worth three beats.
These are commonly known as dotted notes.
Slurs are used similar to ties, but they indicate playing a set of different notes together
without separating them, unlike ties which involves the same note.
So to add a slur select a note and press the s key.
To extend the slur beyond to more notes, press shift and the right arrow key.
Do this until the slur covers all the notes you want.
Now let’s talk about how to work with different key signatures.
There’s a few different ways to deal with this in musescore.
If you have a few notes that aren’t in the same key, called accidentals, you can add
them at the top menu.
Select the note you want to change, then use the sharp or flat key to change it.
You can also do this by selecting a note and using the up and down arrows.
This increases or decreases the note by one semitone at a time, and it will add all the
accidentals automatically if the note doesn’t fall in the key your project is in.
To change the key of the song, we go to the side menu under key signatures and select
what key you’re working with.
This will apply it to all measures after the one you drag it onto, so you can have multiple
keys in a song if you want.
Just start at the first measure and change them as you move towards the end of the song.
Keep in mind that changing the key signature only changes the formatting, there’s no
change to the actual notes that are represented.
If you want to actually change all the notes instead, you can use the transpose tool.
Go to the notes menu at the top and select transpose.
Then use one of the options to transpose the music.
You can do this by key, interval, or diatonically.
This will also change the formatted key signature for the song.
Depending on the song you’re working with, you may need to change the time signature
from the default 4/4 time.
You can find some standard time signatures on the left side.
If you want to create your own, press shift and T to open up the time signatures menu.
Then you type in what you want your time signature to be.
Whether you’re working with the time signature window or using a default time signature on
the left, simply drag and drop it to a measure to apply it.
It will apply it to that measure and all the ones after it.
You also need to know how to change the tempo of your song.
First go to the add menu at the top and select tempo marking under text.
This will add the tempo making to whatever note you have selected.
Double click the text number and change it to whatever you want your tempo to be, and
musescore will automatically play it back at that tempo.
You can also change the tempo and have multiple tempos throughout the song.
Chances are, you’ll want to change the dynamics of your music, either to make some parts softer
or louder.
These can be found on the left side under dynamics.
Just drag them onto the score for a particular instrument, and it will be applied to everything
forward from that point.
Under articulations, you can also accent certain notes.
Once again, just click and drag onto the note you want to apply it.
Before starting this section, just make sure you have the enable repeats function selected
at the top.
All functions for repeats and jumps can be found under its section in the left menu.
First let’s start off with a simple repeat.
Add the start and end barlines for the measures you want to repeat.
If you don’t add the start barline, it will repeat from the beginning.
With this setup, we’ll play through the first 8 measures normal, then skip back to
bar 5 and play through, then continue for the rest of the song.
Our first jump will be D.C.
This indicates to jump to the beginning of the score and play everything back all over
again.
Just drag it to the measure you want it applied to.
After it gets there the second time, it will keep playing past it.
Another one you can use is D.C. al fine.
Once again, this jumps back to the beginning, but it only plays up to fine.
At that point, everything stops, so don’t add anything past here, because it won’t
be played.
Setting up a D.C. al Coda requires a little more work.
To do this, we’ll setup our first part of our music and end it on a double bar line,
which is found under the barlines palette.
Then, we need to separate our main section from the coda.
Click the measure right after our double bar line.
Then go to the add menu, select frames, and insert horizontal frame.
This will separate the main part from the coda.
At the end of our section, add D.C. al coda.
When it reaches this point, it will jump back to the beginning again and play until it reaches
To Coda, which you can add from the repeats and jumps menu.
Add the coda indicator to tell it where to play next and it will continue to play those
measures until the end.
There’s also the option to use DS, DS al fine, and DS al Coda.
One of the features of musescore is the ability to work with multiple instruments on the same
score.
First open the instruments window under the edit menu.
Here you can add a lot of different instruments, remove instruments, and change how they’re
displayed, such as the type of clef.
Finally, you can also select an instrument and use the up or down arrows to change the
order, which changes the order they show up on the score.
Another thing we can do is add lyrics to our song.
To do this, click the note on the staff that the lyric is associated with.
You’ll want to have setup a separate instrument for vocals and have all the notes inputted
before you do this.
With the note selected, go to the add menu and select lyrics under text.
You can also do this by pressing control and L. Then just type in the lyric.
You’ll need to do this individually for every word in the song.
This is a little tedious, but it allows more control since you can set up each word with
timing and pitch.
After we’re done creating our score, we just need to export.
There’s a few ways to share a file.
First, we can give other musescore users the musescore save file.
Second, we can create a PDF that can be opened by anyone.
Finally, we can print the project on paper to have a hard copy.
Thanks for watching this video on how to use musescore for music notation.
If you found this tutorial helpful, don’t forget to give the video a like and subscribe
to the channel.
We’ll be doing a few more musescore tutorials in the future.
You can also check out all social media accounts, which are linked in the video description
below.