Music composition.

[Alex Robertson]

I enjoy conducting choirs, and occasionally like to write my own music, some of which I may put up here… But I honestly don’t have a good program. I used to use Noteworthy Composer, but am personally still attached to shape notes. Are there good programs that you can make sheet music with shape notes without investing a lot of money for someone who just likes dabbling in it?

Discussion

[Lynn Martin]

There’s MuseScore, which is open source, so it’s completely free. I know people who use it and find it adequate. I used it for one song and couldn’t figure out all the options, but then I didn’t spend a ton of time on it since I already have Sibelius.

[James Hostetler]

You can use shaped notes in Musescore. Select the measures you want, then right click. Select “Staff/Part Properties>Advanced Style Properties>Notehead scheme.” In the dropdown box beside “Notehead scheme” select “7-shape (Aikin).”

Musescore also has a good “Help” manual for when you’re stuck.

[Deleted User]

What about Noteworthy that you don’t like. It works well for me. It does shaped notes.

[Author]

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