Tips & Insights from the Music Room Video Lesson: What is the new VSM Playground?

Hello and welcome.

Today we're going to talk about the Virtual Sheet Music Playground:

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/playground/

This is a new software tool we have published on our website a few months ago, which is going to help you a great deal in music preparation.

What I mean is that you can actually import your own music through a music XML file or through a PDF or an image, or you can also take a picture with your phone if you want to. And once the music is inside, you can edit it, you can transpose it, you can change instruments, and you can also play the music, change the tempo, and do a lot of stuff.

So this video is really going to be just an overview of the system, and keep in mind that the software is continuously updated with new features and new abilities, so make sure to subscribe to our mailing list to stay updated. I'll add the link right here.

So let's just dive right in.

You can reach the Playground by going to virtualsheetmusic .com slash Playground, or from the homepage by clicking on the big banner which is currently showcased, or going under the Free Stuff menu and choosing Online Music Editor.

You can also scroll down the page until you find the More Resources section and click the Playground button.

Once you get there, you'll be shown all the information about the new Playground and how it works with a couple videos showcasing its main features.

What is interesting, you can also access the Playground from within Virtual Sheet Music Edition item. For example, if we select this item, you can find the Opening Playground button right here to open the music inside the Playground.

And if an item is not enabled for the Playground yet, you will find this button instead where you can submit your request to enable the item for the Playground.

And of course, we plan to allow the use of the Playground for the rest of the repertoire, such as the pop music from a Leonard, so that even this kind of music can be edited inside the Playground.

But let's jump right into the Playground and see how it works. So if you go inside the Playground dedicated page and you click the Access the Playground button, the Playground will open.

And from here you can find a few showcased pieces that you can select at the top.

Let's try this one for string quartet.

And from here you can see how the Playground is organized.

You have this top control panel which allows you to do several different operations on the sheet music. You have the display controls right here. You have the instrumental controls right here which allows you to transpose or change instruments. And you have these main buttons here that allows you to start over import your own music XML files or import music from PDF files or images. You can of course export your music as a music XML file and save your music as a PDF file or print it out.

And if a piece of music is in our catalog, you can also buy it by adding it to your cart. And finally you find these two big buttons where the first one allows you to provide feedback. Second one to become a member if you want to because some functions may be limited if you are not a member.

And of course you also have this big main switch which allows you to switch between editor and player. I'm going to show you later on in this video what the player mode allows you to do. And recently we have released the ability to edit the text on the score. So you can just click on the text, you can modify, you can also delete it if you want to, instrument names, you can also change the dynamics if you want to. You can also add text if you like. So just select the text you want to add and you can do it.

And you can also remove the slurs or the ties if you want to. So it's pretty handy and it's going to get new features all the time so make sure to check on the Playground page for new updates and of course to sign up for our newsletter. Anyway, the beautiful thing about the Playground is that it can be used inside any kind of device because it's browser based so you can use it on your tablet or your phone even though on the phone of course with a small screen it's hard to handle but we are working on an optimized version for iPhones as well.

Okay let's try to log in and see what you can do without any limitations.

Okay I'm logged as a member now so I'm going to select again the string quartet demo.

So you can see you have this Shade Music displayed for which you can easily change the zoom level if you want to. So you just go on the slider here, you can change the zoom level as you like.

You can also change the pagination if you want to. If you want to have a US letter portrait you can choose that, if you want to have a landscape you can choose that, or a 4 landscape you can choose that.

That's something of course that needs to be managed by yourself. If you choose a landscape format you want to change the zoom level in order to maximize the use of the real estate on the page at your disposal. What's mostly interesting about the Playground about pagination, you can easily change the size of the page by dragging the right handlebar right here and you can see how the music gets resized automatically for you. So you can really play around with any kind of pagination you would like to have.

That's mostly about the display control, you can also set the auto width which takes the whole screen at your disposal, which may be useful for some people.

Moving to Instrumental Controls panel, you can easily change the transposition of the piece. For example this piece in G major and I want to change in A major, I just select A major and the piece gets transposed automatically for you.

And even better you can also change instruments, for example this is a string quartet and let's say I want to put a flute in place of the first violin.

So I'm going to open the Instruments panel, I'm going to select the pop -up menu corresponding to the violin first and then I choose Flute and then I click Done and you will see now you have the flute selected here. What's beautiful is the flexibility of this system which allows you to do really interesting things. For example if I want to remove the second violin or even just display just the flute part we have just created, you can just uncheck these parts and the flute part only is displayed. You can zoom it in a little bit if you want to and then you are ready to to print the flute part only.

And then if you want to display again the whole full score you just do that and the full score is displayed again. Very flexible.

Also for example let's say we want to change the cello part to another viola part.

So I'm going to select this pop -up menu, change it to viola and then if you see it the viola is going to be too low so I'm going to change the octave to put it one octave higher so that the viola part can be playable.

And let me tell you this, this is a kind of a dumb system to change instruments because doesn't take into account the range on the instruments but we are working on a new smarter kind of system where you can change instruments and is going to rearrange the instrument part in order to be kept inside the correct range of the instrument so stay tuned for that. Okay let's look at the player section of this playground. So we're going to switch on the player and as you can see something has been changed in the panel so you can still have the transposition control, the instrumental control, you still have display controls but this section has changed to allow playback so you can play the music.

Okay should we start it from the beginning.

It's going to play the music.

You can decide if you want to follow the the cursor or not. Of course you can define where you want to start playing the music and you can also change the tempo so if you play let's change the tempo to speed it up or slow it down.

And this is very interesting because you can use this for playing along and for practice because from this panel you can also change actually mute the instruments you want to mute.

For example I want to practice the flute part so I'm going to mute the flute part and the playground is going to play just the other parts so I can play along.

Of course you can also control the volume of the instruments so if you want to lower them you can lower.

This is very very useful.

For now the sounds are certainly just you know synthesized sounds, not very high quality even to reduce the impact on the web browser where we planned to allow higher quality samples in the near future at least for the most powerful devices.

And the last little tip about the playground is to click on this small arrow at the top right right here to close the panel so you can use more of your computer or a device display.

Okay so that's it about this overview of the playground.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about it so make sure to click on the feedback button and report your feedback. You can post questions, requests, feature requests or anything you can think of.

We'll get back to you very very instantly so stay tuned because the playground is a work in progress and I recommend checking the import feature which is very interesting. Still in development it's not perfect yet so expect some mistakes when you import for example PDF files or images but it works perfectly if you import music xml files.

Okay so what do you think about this new tool? I'm really eager to know your thoughts if you have any suggestions or ideas go and try it at the link I provided before or you know the link you can see here again and let me know your thoughts. You can post your comments on the page or the playground or you can as always send an email to tipsinsights at virtualsheetmusic.com. I'll love to get in touch with you.

And so we are done for today and I'll see you in the next one.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---