The Future of Sheet Music: Another Reason I Chose MuseScore
by Don Chapman
If you read my recent article about the new TRANSPOSE feature, you know how excited I am about what’s happening at Hymncharts. As I’ve dug into Musescore I absolutely love it – very intuative and snappy. My Finale-to-MuseScore software has fulfilled a dream I’ve wanted for nearly twenty years: sheet music you can instantly transpose into the key you need in your browser without needing any additional software!
But I’ll admit, there was one piece of MuseScore news that made me a little nervous.
Tantacrul, the musician, designer, and YouTuber who helped lead so many of MuseScore’s improvements, had left Muse Group earlier this year, the company behind the software. I thought “uh oh.”
Then I watched his new video and came away feeling a lot better:
Who’s Tantacrul?
Meet Notefinder
Tantacrul and a group of former colleagues have started a company called Notefinder. They’re bringing together professional arrangers, editors, instrumentalists and software developers to create a new form of digital sheet music publishing.
Their website lets musicians find arrangements, listen to them, and download music for printing. There’s also a free iPad reader that can display your own PDFs as well as music from their catalog.
More Than a PDF
I had never considered one of Tantacrul’s points: most digital sheet music still behaves much like a printed page.
You can download a PDF, zoom in, and print it. But if the song is too high for your congregation, that PDF doesn’t give you a button to lower the key. PDFs were not invented for sheet music!
That’s exactly the kind of problem I’ve wanted to solve at Hymncharts. I’ve had chord charts in every key for years. Now I’m adding that flexibility to the sheet music.
His broader vision is a digital music format that preserves both the music and its appearance while allowing musicians to adapt it to their needs. That could include different keys, more readable layouts, and better options for people with disabilities.
There’s still work ahead on that larger vision. But the idea of making useful changes before printing is something I’m already excited to offer through TRANSPOSE.
Still Making MuseScore Better
Here’s the part of the video that made me really happy!
The Notefinder team is using MuseScore Studio for its own publishing work, and continuing to work on the software itself.
Several of the people who helped improve MuseScore are involved in this new company. Because MuseScore is open source, their developers can improve the underlying code when they need a better way to do something.
For example, they’re working to reduce the time arrangers spend adjusting the appearance of a score. Anyone who has ever nudged something around on a page of music will understand the appeal of that!
And those improvements can reach beyond Notefinder. As Tantacrul explains:
“Best of all, we can submit those fixes back to MuseScore Studio itself.”
Once the MuseScore team integrates those changes, other MuseScore users can benefit, too.
He describes their role as “contributors now, rather than show-runners.”
That was reassuring to hear. Some of the people with the deepest knowledge of MuseScore are still putting that knowledge to work, with a new publishing business giving them plenty of reasons to keep improving it!
How This Helps Hymncharts
When I chose MuseScore over Dorico for Hymncharts, I was thinking about the musicians who use my arrangements. A reader’s comment about ease of use and the value of free software for smaller churches helped settle that decision.
Since then, my conversion software and TRANSPOSE have given me even more reasons to be glad I chose it. I still create my arrangements in Finale, then convert them into MuseScore for these new possibilities.
Hearing what Tantacrul’s team is doing to integrate Musescore into their platform AND improve it gives Musescore better longevity (and probably dominance in the sheet music world.)
Of course, you don’t need to follow the world of notation software to benefit. My goal is to make preparing your music a little easier: choose an arrangement, find a key that suits your singers, and get ready for Sunday.
Look for the TRANSPOSE button as I add this feature to more arrangements. My prayer is that these tools will help your musicians serve confidently and your congregation sing wholeheartedly.
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