Hello! This week in Basic Music Theory we're starting to work on intervals and chromaticism, so that's going to be coming up a lot in my discussions and upcoming events.

Mastering MuseScore

For the ultimate guide to the world's most popular music notation software, see my online course Mastering MuseScore 4.

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

When you see no key signature, it doesn't necessarily mean the key of C major. And I don't just mean that it could be A minor, or even D dorian or G mixolydian - although those are also possibilities. I mean, it could mean no key at all. This is pretty common in much classical music written in the last century, and much jazz in the last half-century. The music may be atonal (completely without a key center), or it might just change keys so often that it isn't worth notating a key signature.

MuseScore provide a special open/atonal key signature for this purpose. For more on this, see the full post in the community.

Musicianship Skills

If you want to learn more about music - theory, composition, improvisation, and more - become a Gold level member and receive access to all of our music courses as well as exclusive benefits like my weekly Office Hours.

Music Master Class

This week in the Music Master Class with Marc Sabatella, we'll try to unravel some of the complexities of intervals, including a practical exploration and frank discussion of singing and identifying them aurally.

In Theory

I have a few soapboxes that I jump on from time to time, and this is one of them.
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Almost anyone who has ever studied theory learns the names of the intervals at some point, and immediately afterward, a set of songs that open with each interval - like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" for perfect fifth or "My Bonnie" for major sixth. The promise is that learning these songs will enable you to easily recognize each interval when you hear it and to sing them on command, and this will in turn allow you to learn melodies by ear and sight-sing better. But in my experience, this interval-song association rarely helps much in actual practice. We're left struggling and thinking there must be something wrong with us, when the real problem is a fundamental flaw in this approach that is working against us.

For more insight into this, see the full post in the community.

Until next time, keep making music!

Marc Sabatella

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