Composition (2024 Q1): Learning MuseScore for real

So this is not actually much to do about composition, but rather a stepping-stone to make the process more enjoyable for myself in the future. I've been placing the notes using the mouse-controls (which is to say the track-pad controls, since I like working on laptops, wherever I happen to find the time) and as a person who dislikes clicking stuff for long periods of time, that got boring and miserable very quick. I'm not an especially fast composer, but I still think about music faster than I can click. I've upgraded to using a touch-screen, but that also turned out to be a marginal improvement at best. I was semi-recently informed though, that there is a way to type input. That technically sounds more like my jam, provided it's not like writing LaTeX, which - though I love it - is like pulling nails, if suddenly every symbol contains special symbols. I'm pretty sure there's some keyboards that I've worn out the "\" key on.

At the same time, I would like a few things to help me improve some technical aspects of my playing. It's dull work to write down, and doesn't technically even need to be written down, but having a paper taunting me to learn its contents is a great motivator. This makes it a perfect candidate for my purposes.

I need the running passages of my piano playing to 1. come more easily, and 2. sound more even. So far I've managed to get there by just practicing the passage, and that'll help, sure, but it doesn't really provide the technical basis that might one day allow me to sight-read these passages, and to be honest, it's becoming slightly embarrassing to be able to sight-read most parts of a piece and be tripped up by a D-minor scale. There's really only one remedy: Practice scales and basic passages (or their components, perhaps in form of a passage). Technically the same goes for my violin playing, though I'm not going to commit to writing out the scales there, or think too much on it. That's something I'm hoping will resolve itself once I understand at a glance what I'm supposed to be playing.

I wouldn't want to overdo it, so I'll write 2 octaves of scale, without the recommended fingering, since these papers will be used for different instruments. The other patterns I'll have to check when they become "complete" so to say. When I'm done, I have something nice to print, and hopefully be used to typing my MuseScore input. A guide to inputs can be found on the online handbook, which is a clear indicator that I avoid reading documentation to the point of my own detriment.

The Major Scales and Revelations

Okay, so I was going to think about how to arrange stuff so that it won't look absolutely terrible. In the process of that, I had to write a scale a few times, and I noticed that it barely took half a minute to write down a C-Major scale. That is sobering and very relieving. I'm hoping that that means that I won't have much trouble adjusting and that it will actually improve my noting down of the notes significantly.

Thinking about where to start the scale is also something to think about being able to make octave-shifts at the press of a key is so much better than shifting them down by semi-tone steps. I do however notice that I don't know the order of letters when I'm told to start at an arbitrary point in the alphabet. At the moment, thinking about which letter comes after "d" is the primary time-waster in the process. A current work-around is my knowledge of the staff, where I can just imagine where the next note goes, and finding it on the keyboard. It of course gets worse when I'm descending a scale, rather than ascending it... While I'm figuring out, how typing notes feels, it starts feeling eerily like playing a small and slightly unresponsive piano.

Isn't this nice-looking? I would have hated doing this with a trackpad, or even on a touch-screen, but typing input cut down the work to about 20 minutes, and that's mainly due to the aforementioned alphabet issue. Unfortunately, minor scales have natural, melodic and harmonic variations, and since the melodic ones are kinda boring to write down, I'm going to stick to the other two. It'll still make the section twice as long as the major scales.

A Case for Practicing Notation

I'm not sure what the process of learning music notation was really like for me, back when I first did it, but I think it might have been very separate from the playing. Part of it is that sight-reading and playing by heart have become two entirely separate processes for me. Playing things by heart is almost completely divorced from knowing which notes I'm playing. It frees up the brain for thinking about phrasing and melody, but in honestly, these things rarely every take up too much real-estate if I'm not really struggling with a piece. As such, it would probably be better to marry the two modes with one another, at least a little bit. For one, this will probably expedite the process of learning things by heart. Instead of relying completely on muscle-memory, it'll be a slightly more cerebral process, which I suspect will make things a little easier as well. For that though, I'd have to know which notes I'm playing when I'm not sight-reading.

Obviously scales will help, if I remember to try and keep track of the notes, but I also suspect just writing a lot of notation will also help. This is primarily due to the notes being mapped onto the homonymous letters on the keyboard, which I, oddly, don't have any problem keeping track of. We will see, how these things change as time goes on.

A Change in Process

Lastly, knowing that typing will become a primary method of input for me will somewhat make up for the way I compose. Mouse input gives you a lot of time to think about how the note you just placed sounds in context with what you have up to that point. It makes using an instrument somewhat redundant, but often creates scores that are not fun to play, because they in fact weren't composed for the intricacies of an instrument. When there's no risk of forgetting everything you've figured out while messing around on an instrument because you were futzing about with a trackpad, composing on an instrument becomes much more appealing. I have to effectively compose at home anyway, and since I've started gathering electric (read: silent) versions of almost all instruments I play, there is little excuse not to do the entire process on an instrument.