Hello from Marc Sabatella of Outside Shore Music, home of Mastering MuseScore and other great resources! This week marks the 100th anniversary of the premiere of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", which combines classical and jazz elements in ways that are really ahead of its time. I'll be exploring various aspects of the piece this week.

For those of you who are members of the Outside Shore Music community, please remember to reset your passwords if you haven't done so after the big changeover from masteringmusescore.com to outsideshore.com.

Mastering MuseScore

If you are interested in getting the most out of the world's most popular music notation software, join our community with a Mastering MuseScore membership for the most comprehensive training & expert support available!

MuseScore Café

This week in the MuseScore Café with Marc Sabatella, I'll look at the process of "cleaning up" a score, whether an older one of your own or one created by someone else. There may be musical errors to correct, aspects of engraving style to improve, updates that need to happen after importing into a newer version of MuseScore, or other changes you'd like to make for your own reasons. We'll hit on a number of techniques and program features along the way that can be useful for other purposes as well.

The free MuseScore Café is live on Wednesday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

Tip of the Week

MuseScore has simple commands with dedicated toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts for "simple" tuplets like triplets or quintuplets. But did you know you can also create more complex tuplets like 17:16? In this video post, I show you how.

Musicianship

If you are serious about learning music - theory, composition, improvisation, and more - become a Gold-level member and receive access to all of our music courses and workshops, as well as exclusive benefits like my weekly Office Hours, in addition to our acclaimed Mastering MuseScore resources.

Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we'll be taking a deeper look at George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

The free Music Master Class is live on Thursday at 12:30 PM Eastern (16:30 GMT, or 17:30 during the winter months), and you can access past episodes in the archive.

In Theory

George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" is famous for incorporating jazz elements into a more classical context. One of the more jazz-influenced sounds is the way he treats the V7 chord throughout the piece, using rootless voicings and alterations like b9, b13, and #9. In this video post, I show how these all come together right off the bat in the second chord of the piece.