The quest is never straightforward. We run into delays and diversions. Sometimes, you get blocked on things and have to keep trying, blast through, or go around. You can be working on something and have it be the wrong direction, hours wasted. You can work in the right direction, get right to the cusp of success and have something go terribly wrong. (“Terribly wrong” for me used to be a blown tube, right when I got things working with my hands. Now, it’s a string snapping. Curse you, B!)
MuseScore is the tool that’s supposed to make it easier. I’ve written about this particular problem many times, like here
It’s always been a pain in the ass for me, but I stick with it because of what it does better than anything else: Ted Greene diagrams.
Now, I’ve written a plugin that makes it work better for me with something else, handling chords.
Read on.
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I love chords. And I hate the way that the MuseScore chord library stores them: it’s one big flat, undifferentiated mass. You can’t label chords or subcategorize them.
What to do about this? What if I want to see all the F chord voicing available to me for measure 1, beat 1 of the sheet? Guitar Pro 8 has come a long way from 7 and while you can browse lots of shapes, you can’t add to them, the library is a walled garden guarded by cherubim with blazing swords. Tux Guitar is cool, too, but it has a hell of a lot of limitations.
Neither do Ted Greene diagrams .
So I wrote a plugin! It’s in queue to be reviewed right now. Here’s the GitHub . You should download it and install it.
It’s a floating panel that organizes chords by type, quality and tuning.
Above: the main view. You can see all the chords available to you in your filtration. You have options to arpeggiate them and you can also see color coded diagrams for the note positions.
Above: Look at how many different chord qualities are supported.
Above: Choose the voicing type, you can have common types like Drop 2, Quartal, Altered, etc.
Above: Here’s the best part, you have lots of different tunings available to you!
Above: You can create new tunings, export and import voicings and do lots of library maintenance, all from your laptop.
Here’s how the plugin works: select a note or rest, and then select the chord voicing you want from the playlist. You can hear the chord quality, either as a chord or an arpeggio. Everything is by default in C, but when you place it with a chord symbol, it will reproject itself for the key you need. So, for example, here, when we add Dom 7 Chord, it will add the chord as F7.
You can also import chords that you create on a score, it will retroject them to C.
I’m storing in C to minimize the the size of the library. Every shape is there, you just need to put it in a beat.
The normal workflow is
Enter note or rest. I do the whole melody at once. You can do it note by note, if you want, adding the chord symbols after each note.
Once I have the symbols in, I choose the note or the rest for which to add the fretboard diagram.
Pick the chord I want from the library.
Hit “open” and then paste, Command-V on Mac.
And there you have it, a fretboard diagram. This whole system was designed to make using MuseScore less painful.
Here are a few known pain points:
I need a bigger chord library.
I need someone to test in Windows and help with the commands to make paste work there.
I need someone from MuseScore to approve my pull request so that this paste workaround is no longer necessary.
Please feel free to make as much use as you can, this solves a huge pain in MuseScore.
Now, back to songs.
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📎 Files and downloads are available in the original Substack post.