Try To Make It Easy To Read!

With the advent of great new free tools like Muse Score, I find more musicians creating their own custom parts for the members of their bands. Unfortunately some of the default settings for these programs including Finalé, Sibelius, and Dorico all want to beam 8th notes in a way that can be difficult to read. Because of the 10 key layout it takes more time to enter staccato markings causing an overuse of rests to make notes short. This leads to the music looking cluttered and making it hard to play. A great composer once told me that the music should sound hard to play and be easy to read, but if the music sounds easy to play but it’s hard to read then you’re doing something wrong.