Revision control and sheet music

Musescore is a wonderful tool. It has made a huge impact on my musical development over the past couple decades. Sheet music is the primary way I communicate and record musical ideas, and Musescore the tool and musecore.com have combined to make a process that works for me and my musical needs.

I have also spent a few years writing software, and the methods that we have learned to use in software development have evolved due to needs of scale and flexibility. I would like to apply some of those lessons to how I manage sheet music. But there are disconnects.

The biggest issue I have is that I want the same core song in multiple different but related formats. The second biggest issue is that I want to be able to make changes to a song, and to collaborate with other composers in making those changes.

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A Different Key Setup for Chords

For my birthday last year, my family got me an accordion. Yes, I am one of those people that collect musical instruments, not for their monetary value but because I enjoy trying them out. I spent some time trying to wrap my mind and my hands around the one button chord set up on the side. I know there are masters out there that have developed a set of techniques, but for those of use from other instruments, the arraignment of notes and chords in a cycle of fifth is challenging.

It got me thinking about how else you could arrange them. This might also be somewhat inspired by guitar and bass setups, but here is what I came up with:

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Splitting the irealpro 1400

The irealpro player has become an indispensable tool for practicing a tune. Since I play saxophone, the fact that irealpro will give me a full rhythm section to play against makes working on a tune far more possible than it was for me in the past.

I recently got a new phone and went to reinstall the set of songs that I use. They come from a collection called the Jazz 1400. This snuck up slightly in number from the last time I imported, and it must have hit a threshold, because my phone refuses to import it.

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Fixing Playback in Musecore on Fedora 35

Recently, the playback on Musescore became distorted. It was sped up, the notes were dissonant (no that is not my writing!) and they seemed to crackle and pop.

When both systems I have exhibited the same problem, I knew it was an upgrade issue, and not my hardware.

This phenomenon seems to have occurred a few times over the years, and I tried many of the recommended fixes. What finally worked was changing the output from PulseAudio to Jack.

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