Dedicated Musescore keypad

In my opinion, using Musescore can be improved with a dedicated keyboard that is customized to work with it. For many, using the standard keyboard shortcuts are sufficient. Others find routing their MIDI controller to do the work is good for them. For me, a separate keyboard was the best solution. It probably has to do with my working with a tiny Akai MPKmini, my preferred setup for notating. I'm not the first to have this opinion; a quick search turned up these old threads:

https://musescore.org/en/node/69886
https://musescore.org/en/node/72246

In this post, I want to show you two approaches I've taken and the issues that you'll have to deal with if you'd like to try these yourself.

The recycled keyboard and AHK

AutoHotKey (AHK) is a powerful scripting language that can accomplish a bewildering number of things. Much, so much of it is outside the realm of this discussion. For out purposes here, say you have two full-size, 104-key keyboards attached to your computer. With a particular AHK script running in the background, it will intercept the key presses coming from one of them and turn them into something else.

WARNING: Going down an internet rabbit hole at this point is not recommended. If you are watching YouTube videos about emoji keyboards, turn back now.

I'd recommend you visit TaranVH's GitHub page to learn more about his AHK script:

https://github.com/TaranVH/2nd-keyboard

With his instructions, you are able to modify his AHK script to convert keystrokes from the second keyboard into anything allowed by AHK -- which is admittedly not very limiting, AHK can be insanely involved. For our purposes, we'll keep it to keystroke in, keystroke out. This then is obviously the goal: we want the "keystroke out" resulting from the keypress on the extra keyboard to do something in Musescore. Here, we arrive at a philosophical decision. Do we decide to change the output of the AHK script to correspond to the default Musescore shortcuts, or does our AHK script output some arcane keystroke (or combination) that we define in Musescore? In my opinion, the latter is preferred. I have thought about this quite a bit, and I've come to the conclusion that it's just the way I prefer to do things -- more on this later, though.

Below you can see my second keyboard, a thrift store Logitech that can easily be put out of the way after a Musescore session. You can see the advantage of the 2nd keyboard/AHK approach: I get to decide where each command resides, and I've got potentially 104 commands at my fingertips without having to use any modifiers (that is, shift, command, alt, and win). The disadvantage: a second full-size keyboard on my desk.

The dedicated keypad

Once I got used to using the second keyboard, I began to think how much better it would be if it were smaller. Surely the video editing or gaming communities have run into the same issues as us music notators, and have come up with elegant solutions, right? It turns out, yes and no. There are many keypads available for gaming, but their prices can raise an eyebrow, and their layouts don't translate very well to Musescore. Video editors have a fondness for "macro keyboards," but these do way more than the basic commands that we need. There is also the route of building your own keyboard. WARNING: another internet rabbit hole lies ahead. This route is best reserved for those who are passionate about building keyboards, not for people who only want to use them for specific tasks. Our paths will intersect with those of the mechanical keyboard community -- again, more on this later.

The best, and with some confidence I say the only reasonable solution at the present time for the dedicated keypad is the Koolertron 48-key programmable keypad:

http://www.koolertron.com/koolertron-singlehanded-programmable-mechanic…

This keypad is a solid device. The switches are from Gateron -- they won't get the mechanical keyboard geeks excited, but they're decent, and they are compatible with Cherry MX keycaps. It is possible to set up three different key layouts using the programming software, but I have not delved into that. My approach to using this keypad was to program the keys to use the extended function keys F13-F20 with different combinations of modifier keys, then to assign those F-key/modifier combinations to Musescore commands. You can see in the picture how I've assigned each column a function key, and each row a combination.

I have not been using this very long, but already I can see that I prefer this to using a large second keyboard. Economy of motion is important. It allows you to get into the flow of your work more easily when you don't have to search for a particular key. Let me explain a bit about the layout, remembering that I'm using a MIDI keyboard for pitch input:

I've arranged my note lengths on the second row. Below them, I've put the dot, tie, triplet, and enharmonic toggle. The rest is in the lower right where I can get it with my thumb. Octave modifiers are at the end of the row. Above the note lengths I have articulations. I have dedicated keys to select Voices 1-4. In the upper left I have "arrow" keys that move between notes and staves. On the right, the arrow keys make a selection as they proceed, and nearby are Copy and Paste. Three keys at the top can be used to turn a pasted horn line in a drum part into cue notation (1. Swap voices 1 and 3; 2. Toggle rhythmic notation; 3. Fill with slashes). Various keys throughout take care of not having to reach for the main keyboard or a palette.

This layout is based on the large keyboard I first used, which was refined over a few years. This is optimized for the kind of arranging I do -- jazz and pop -- but I believe this approach is flexible enough to work with all sorts of arranging styles.

Because the key switches are MX-compatible, there are multitudes of keycaps available. Someday I might get a set of Musescore blue caps to make it look nice, but for now I've made due with labels made with mixing board tape covered with packing tape -- durable and more than adequate.

CONCLUSION

There are advantages to using a dedicated keyboard to augment your Musescore workflow. By now, I cannot see myself using Musescore without the aid of the second keyboard, it has make working with the program that much more easy. It's my hope that this post will save somebody some time when they begin to ask themselves the same questions I asked myself years ago.