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Dang. It's really nice to hear things from this from members after so many years! It was a chaotic time and I'm glad we can look back at it and close that chapter now.

I hope he's doing well.

Awesome, it looks much better now! Your new sheet looks great too (I think you have the source links swapped )

I hope it's not too much trouble to wait until we get our infrastructure set up to start submitting MuseScore sheets!

Nice sheet! I'm not an expert, but I think 9ths are the largest acceptable interval for most people. I know for me personally unless I'm rolling it or using my other hand I can't consistently play anything over 9ths.
(Also unless I'm missing something I think you have a typo in your "Energetic" musical direction  )

Yep, I agree! My rule of thumb and what I'll suggest to others writing arrangements is:
- Octave: perfectly acceptable just about anywhere.
- Ninth: more people will struggle with this, so use sparingly, especially if the performer doesn't have much time to get into position.
- Tenth: physically impossible for some, difficult for most others; avoid if possible.

Note that it's okay to have performers roll these intervals, although this is nicer to do when there is pedal used and the performer is not in the middle of an intricate passage (for example, just playing occasional rolled chords with the left hand, and not while managing two independent layers in the right hand). Different people will have different philosophies about how large of an interval is okay to include in different places, but do remember that it's easy to unintentionally write something that's too difficult. Be nice to the performer and make it easier if you can without sacrificing the sound

Heya! I'm sorry I haven't taken a look earlier! Just taking a look at the sheets you've posted so far I think you're doing fantastic and would say you're more than ready to submit to the main site. Let me know if you have any questions ^^

Hello and welcome! Sorry, I peeked at your post but forgot to reply!

However, when I first done the arrangement (mostly by memory, even before I transcripted it on Musescore), I came up with a slightly different melody from bar 72 up to bar 92. In my opinion, the original melody sounds a bit weird on the piano. Tell me what you think!

Were you trying to create your own melody here? The melody you wrote in the first version sounds correct and fine on piano to me!

Welcome to the community side of NinSheetMusic!

You've done a great job for your first sheet - at a glance, this is quite accurate and very cleanly written! Rhythms, layers, articulations are used correctly.

My main piece of feedback right now would be to do some tweaking in the upper staff parts where you have two layers (m. 14+, and towards the end as well). What you have here is not playable by one right hand - the intervals are too large. I'd suggest picking a part that you want to prioritize and focus more on that. It can be a bit tricky to try to keep the essence of both layers, so feel free to ask for help.

As for MuseScore vs. Finale - as announced recently we plan on adding submission support for MuseScore sheets in the future! It may be a little while before we have the infrastructure all set up, if you don't mind waiting until then. You can still get feedback to continue working on your sheet in this thread. Otherwise, community members are around to help you convert to Finale files if you would like to submit your sheet sooner!

Outstanding choice. Also hi K-NiGhT!

Unfortunately, the sheet shared above isn't really written in a piano friendly way - huge intervals in the right hand and such.

I do have a really old arrangement of this lying around here - written for two hands but definitely kind of unfriendly to play with the huge left hand jumps. Maybe I will have time to play with it soon...

asdflksdfjg sorry for taking so long to get back to you on this one. it has been a busy late summer/early fall

-m1-4: After one repeat (and also continuing in m5-8), there seems to be an added fifth to the guitar chords.

Wow that is quite subtle. I like it, adding it helps with the buildup of intensity in the intro! Removed the repeat on the first four bars and added the fifths in the right hand. Note from here on the measure numbers of the feedback are going to be offset by 4 because of this insertion.

-m73: Do you think there's a way to add some ties into the R.H. note here, since it's tied over from m56? There's some shenanigans you could do with an extra measure that's excluded from the measure numbering that has a chord with invisible noteheads that ties into this measure, but maybe there's an easier solution lol.

Oh yeah, I forgot to do something about that. This might not be the best solution but I added a grace note chord at the beginning of the measure, and changed the notehead and stem symbols to things that appear blank to me, then pushed it left a bit. Let me know if this looks okay on your end! I also added a dash manually here through Text > Insert Hard Hyphen and pushed it left to match the other similar places (current m. 61).

-m83 and 87: Maybe it's easier for the R.H. to take the upper note in these measures? They're pretty stretchy for the L.H.

I wanted to keep the melody 1-1 with the lyrics here and figured it was easily enough implied to have the RH take the top notes of those chords, but I realize I've put more notes under the melody in the RH in other sections anyway. Poked those few up! (Didn't bother tying them over into the next measures)

-m117: The R.H. doesn't go up in the original, it stays on the G instead.

If that's the only c/p error I've made in this long sheet, I'd call that an overall win! Haha, thanks for catching it.

-I don't remember if or how this song repeats in-game, is that something you feel like figuring out and including in the arrangement?

Let me explore that a little bit and get back to you about that later; I don't remember myself. Everything else above has been updated though! Thanks again!

[Last Voyage]

Last Voyage

I don't think I have anything left to add, this looks great. Accepted!

And that's both sheets, so this thread is now complete

[Koopa Troopa Beach]

Fantastic! Koopa Troopa Beach is now accepted!

Looks great! The last thing I have to say is that the left hand of m. 51 should outline A minor instead of F major (e.g. how measure 5 is written).

I left them out because...I don't really hear them lol. I could try to add in some implied harmony but I went for accuracy to the song over consistency if that makes sense.

Hm that makes sense, but I feel like the accompaniment texture as a whole is still similar in that last section. I think it would make sense to keep it consistent throughout the piece especially since the piece is building to a climax at the end. How would you feel about that?

All the other changes look good!

[Mainland Port/Aquarium/Theater]

Mainland Port/Aquarium/Theater

Sorry, forgot to take a look earlier! Changes look good, approved

Good questions!

-Are there any differences between Finale's and Musescore's respective formatting that appear to be unsurmountable? If I remember correctly from seeing some MuseScore sheets back in the day, the notation never appeared as sharp and crisp as sheets that were written natively in Finale, for example.

Not anymore! By default, MuseScore sheets do look pretty different from sheets made from the Finale template we've been using. But we (@XiaoMigros in particular) have been doing a bunch of investigation around matching the same fonts/styles in MuseScore to meet visual parity. You can get a sneak peek of that with @Static's sheet here, where the PDFs generated from the Finale and MuseScore versions look remarkably similar. We'll have more guidance around this to come soon (tm).

-Down the road, when Finale versions are more or less unusable because of lack of developer support, will the option to submit .mus files be removed entirely? Or is that a bridge to cross when we get there?

No plan at the moment. We'll think more about that as time goes on and we have fewer members around who have the program readily available to use. Even without any further developer support, we can still manage to get by with the state Finale is in today.

-What can the shock troops in the community (me) do to be helpful for the transition process here?

Thank you (and others who I've been talking to as well) for offering to help I'd say these few things for now:
- If you are able to help check any current submissions at all, that would really help as some of our staff (mostly Xiao and myself) are focusing more of our attention on this transition than reviewing existing submissions. You don't have to be an updater or review everything about a sheet to leave helpful comments!
- If you're not familiar with MuseScore already, you can try and mess around with it to build some familiarity and expertise. We will likely eventually rely partially on community support for help engraving with MuseScore so the more members around who are familiar with it, the better. As for actual sheets to submit, after we finish drafting up guidelines for how to format submissions in MuseScore, we'll need people to run through it and see if the process is smooth so we can refine it. That will need to wait a little bit (a few weeks?) until we finish writing that up though!

[All of the files we offer you today aren't going anywhere]

Hi everyone!

A couple of weeks ago, the company MakeMusic announced that the music notation program Finale is discontinued effective immediately. Any Finale users are being encouraged to migrate to other music notation programs. As you might know, all of the 5000+ sheets we host on our site are engraved using Finale. So what does this mean for NinSheetMusic?

Well, let's first start with what's not changing. All of the files we offer you today aren't going anywhere. Nothing is happening to the PDF and MIDI file formats. So for any users using the site to download sheet music or MIDI files, this has no impact at all. And for those interested in notation files or those who have arrangements on the site, discontinuation of the program doesn't affect the mountain of Finale files we've accumulated over the years. The Finale files will stay and still be usable by those who still have Finale running on their computers. We also will continue to accept submissions made using Finale for the foreseeable future.

What will change, then? As Finale slowly fades into obscurity, we are planning to do what some of our users have been requesting for a long time - start accepting sheet music made using MuseScore. It would be great to allow users to submit sheets made by any notation program of their choice, but that is not practical at the moment. As a first step, we will focus on adding support for sheets made using MuseScore. This is a natural direction to go since MuseScore is free, making it easier for newer arrangers to get started contributing, and open source, putting the fate of the program more in the hands of users. We are lucky to have many community members already intimately familiar with MuseScore to assist. We also plan on adding support for the MusicXML file type on the main site for users to be able to more easily use their program of choice. If this all goes well, we will continue to investigate adding support for more programs like Dorico, which MakeMusic is recommending as Finale's replacement.

All that said, it will take some time to put these changes in effect, so nothing is changing about the submissions process right now. There is a considerable amount of work to be done, including adding support for additional file types on the website and developing guidelines and tools to ensure that sheets created using MuseScore are visually consistent with the rest of our library. So for now, any arrangers submitting to the site should continue with Finale, following the submission process that has been in place for many years. But it may be helpful to start becoming familiar with writing sheets in MuseScore as it's become clear that using Finale is unsustainable long-term. For those MuseScore users who have been discouraged by the submissions process in the past, keep an eye out for when we will start allowing MuseScore submissions! We will keep you posted about developments as they come.

I think that's all for now; thanks for making it this far! Feel free to ask any questions you may have!