drawing music font

• Jul 13, 2014 - 15:04

Hi everybody.
I am an Italian student in comunication design and I am writing my final exam on designing musical typography. I see there is an active development community, so I'm really interested in talking to people who draws typography for Musescore. Can someone please help me?
I'm also interested in knowing if Musescore is professionally used and by who.

Thank you very much,
Chiara Di Terlizzi

Comments

• Jul 13, 2014 - 15:11

I write music for a few bands, mainly original, various sizes. I use MS extensively and am very happy with it. Additionally I find the MS "community" extraordinary, helpful, generally polite and brilliant.

I am grateful.

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• Jul 13, 2014 - 18:02

Thank you all (I love the video).
I'm trying to contact "Gootector" to talk about his re-drawing project!
Anyone else in this community that thinks about fonts?

Fine for the use in educational purpose. I would like to know if someon had ever used it for commercial purpose!

And sure I would love to talk to the man who drew the first font for Musescore.

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• Jul 13, 2014 - 18:44

I'm a professional musician and I use MuseScore professionally all the time. That is, I create scores that are performed professionally by myself and others. But they are not published in the sense of being used as is by major music publishers. Maybe that's what you are really interested in?

The font used in the current version of MuseScore (Emmentaler) is based on the one developed for LilyPond, a different open source notation program that specifically tried to duplicate the look of traditional hand-engraved scores.

For MuseScore 2.0, that font will continue to be available, and presumably will remain the default. Gonville may or may not also be available - not sure of the status of that. But there definitely will be one very significant new font included: Bravura, an open source font designed as the reference font for the new SMuFL standard for music fonts. If you're not familiar with SMuFL and Bravura, you definitely need to check this out.

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• Jul 13, 2014 - 19:34

Yes, actually I was thinking mainly about music for selling and the major publishers. But it's really interesting also to know what a professional musician searchs in a printed sheet, specially in a software that he can use directly.

Know Lilipond-know Bravura-know SMuFL.

I guess Emmentaler is open source, like the entire software?
What do you mean when you say that Emmentaler "is based" on Feta (I guess)? There was a single type designer or it was a work of more in the community? What software and guidelines were used?

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• Jul 14, 2014 - 11:09

So have the Lilypond developers drew the font "Emmentaler" and then you pitch it in Musescore?
In the "Team" page of this website I read that Werner Schweer is the type-expert. So it was not him to draw the font?
(Your link is only about the font naming.)

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• Jul 13, 2014 - 21:29

The major publishers I work with generally would not publish music "as is" - you turn in a manuscript that might be typeset with any program or even handwritten for all they care, and they re-engrave it themselves for consistent look and feel across their editions. So I suspect more interesting question is whether any *publishers* use MuseScore. I rather doubt any major ones do, but you never know. Certainly small / independent / self publushers like myself do use it, though.

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• Jul 14, 2014 - 12:42

Not compsotions of my own, no. But I have done editing work on other people's compositions, basically preparing the scores to be re-engraved. This was for a series of books that includes pieces by different composers, so it was especially important to get a consistent look and feel. I know they do the same for works publushed as part of a series (eg, four-part choral arrangements, even if each is published individually).

It's possible if they were publishing a single work by a single composer that was not part of a series of related publications, they might publish it as is. This could be especially true for works that make use of experimental notation that might be hard to reproduce.

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