Hello! Mark your calendars for next Monday - March 4 - as we'll be getting underway with the spring 2024 cohort of the Practical Counterpoint course! The course will run through June 28, and the format will be similar to the recent cohorts for my Basic Music Theory and Harmony and Chord Progressions courses. New content - lessons, exercises, projects - will be released every week, and you'll be able to work at your own pace. Live sessions will be conducted via the regular Music Master Class on Thursdays, and those are recorded for later viewing. So, you don't have to worry about missing anything.

To enroll now, simply subscribe to Outside Shore Music as a Gold-level member. This is an in-depth, university-level course, and I am thrilled to be able to offer this. You won't find anything else like it!

I'll be sharing more information over the coming days, including a special session of the Music Master Class on Thursday, where I'll preview the course and answer your questions. I hope to see you there, and then in the course itself next week!

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, we look at the various types of files used in MuseScore - scores (local and cloud), sounds, templates, styles, palettes, plugins, and more - and discuss strategies for keeping everything organized. We'll touch on backup and synchronization 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

You have probably already discovered that the Up and Down cursor keys will transpose a selection a half step at a time. But doing this will usually introduce accidentals in order to keep the intervals exactly the same, and this might not be what you want. Sometimes you just want a passage to be a step higher - or a third, or a fifth, or whatever - but still within the original key. In this video post, I show you how to use the "transpose diatonically" keyboard commands to do exactly that.

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 preview the upcoming Practical Counterpoint course.

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

Of all the concepts I cover in my online course Practical Counterpoint, there is one that stands out for me as especially powerful despite its relative simplicity. I am referring to a method of structuring a melody so that it works well when a second voice imitates it at some given interval (typically, a fifth higher). There is a lot more that one has to learn to fully understand the contexts in which this method is useful, and more still to learn to fully make use of it, but the method itself is quite straightforward. In this video post, I show an example (based on Bach) in which the principle can be stated as “two steps forward, one step back”.