Not a transcription, but on a related note…

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the music scoring software I use for my transcriptions on this blog is MuseScore. It’s an open-source, free program that answers all of my scoring and transcription needs without the gigantic price tag that appears on the commercial alternatives. The great people at MuseScore gave us a wonderful gift on Xmas Eve, quietly releasing a major upgrade to the software and taking it from version 2.3.2 to version 3.0.0.

In the few years that I’ve been using MuseScore ’til now, I’ve only ever found one limitation that bugged me, and that was the absence of a handwritten-style jazz notation font. There’s something about seeing my clefs, key signatures and other attributes in a relaxed, non-rigid layout that I find more pleasing on the eye and more pleasant to read. Before now, on occasions, I’ve used some silly, time-consuming workarounds to achieve an appearance like this. But the results have been inconsistent and the effort Vs reward has been pretty dubious.

My wishes have been granted with MuseScore 3.0. From within the program, it is now possible to apply the “MuseJazz” notation and symbol font. The effect is an uber-cool output that resembles Real Book lead sheets and handwritten charts of a bygone era, as shown in the sample below.

MuseScore has, for some time, come with its own “jazz text” font, as shown here. I can’t say that’s my preferred text font (as you’ll notice from my usual transcriptions), but MuseScore does give you the freedom and flexibility to apply any text font that is installed on your computer. Therefore it’s not an issue by any means.

So here’s a big thumbs-up from me to the good people at MuseScore. 👍
I’m so grateful that they’ve upgraded this program, and in doing so have left me with ZERO items on my MuseScore wish list.

If you’ve got a hankering for some scoring, be sure to check it out!
https://musescore.org/en/3.0