Hello! As September gives way to October and the leaves start changing here in the Northern hemisphere (and start appearing in the Southern), there are a few changes here in the world of Outside Shore Music also that I'd like to let you know about.

First, as I have indicated recently, I have now enabled a new "gamification" feature for the Outside Shore Music community site. The idea is to incentivize engagement - and yes, I know how buzzwordy that sounds, but it's an accurate description. The system is designed to reward people for sharing posts and comments of value to the community. Those of you who are members should have already received an email with more information (unless you disabled email notifications for announcements in the community), but for the rest of you, see here for some details if you're curious. The bottom line here is, I'm keeping things very low-key with no substantive changes in place yet, and I'm still not really sure how we will take advantage of this or where this will lead. But hopefully we'll have fun figuring it out!

The second change also relates to the community site. To make a long story short: while in the past I have offered a limit form of community access for free in addition to the paid subscriptions I offer, I will be restructuring this going forward. Those of who you have become members of the community but do not have active paid subscriptions can expect a followup email with more information.

Finally, a word about our ongoing Musicianship Workshop. The theme for October is "from melody to composition". We spent last month discussing melody itself, but now it's time to see what we can build with it. We'll explore accompaniment as well as a variety of larger forms. We'd love to have you join us! If you're interested, please become a Gold-level member of the Outside Shore Music community, and then head to the workshop to see what we're up to and get started!

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 continue our first-Wednesday "ask me anything" series. Come with your questions, and I'll do my best to answer!

Tip of the Week

MuseScore Studio supports a large variety of characters that can be inserted into text from various fonts, including accented characters, non-Latin alphabets, geometric shapes, and thousands of musical symbols. In this video post, I show you how to access and use the "Special characters" palette as well as some tricks for accessing commonly-used symbols more directly.

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 will focus on accompaniment and on music created for the projects in the Musicianship Workshop space.

In Theory

One of the most familiar accompaniment patterns found in classical music is an chord arpeggiation known as "Alberti bass". In this video post, I explain the pattern and demonstrate how Mozart uses it in his famous piano sonata in C major.