MuseScore

As a kid, I was exposed to music early on because I come from a family of musicians. My mom is a professional vocal and piano teacher, my dad was a band kid in college, and my older brother played cello throughout elementary to high school. My introduction to music was when my mom picked up the orchestra sheet that my 3rd grade teacher gave to me and wrote that I would be signing up to play cello without consulting me and thus began the 14 year love-hate toxic relationship with my instrument. Anyway, the point is not to say that growing up I loved playing cello, because I really didn’t until I was around 17 — and even then it was kind of like when a toxic ex-boyfriend comes back and apologizes to you for being a terrible boyfriend and you’re like “wow maybe I really like him” for a couple months, but then it goes back to the way it was and you’re like “wow I regret this”, but I digress.

After being introduced to the cello in elementary school, I wanted nothing but to play other instruments because I hated it so much. When I was 12, I begged my parents to buy me a violin because I wanted to be like the other kids (oop), but they said I was too old to learn something new and I cried a lot, but then I realized I had free will. So I bought a chinese flute from Taobao with my lifetime savings, but I was severely humbled and realized that I was not meant for wind instruments. Maybe learning new instruments was not as feasible as I thought. Then came the solution to all of my issues: MuseScore.

MuseScore is essentially a composing/transposing program that allows you to digitize the composing process through a computer. My 12 year old brain was blown away and I ended up spending over half the day making a Studio Ghibli medley the first day I found out about the program. It ended up pretty messy, but after that, I grew more accustomed to the program and made random arrangements with instruments that my friends played throughout all of middle school, junior high, high school, and even college. It’s definitely not the best program out there, but I’ll always have a soft spot for it because of how much I used it in my childhood.

In the end, my parents ultimately ended up gifting me that violin for one of my birthdays, but because they had waited so long, I ended up discovering a really fun hobby that still means a lot to me till this day. Surprisingly, it brings me closer to a lot of people through the dumb arrangements that we play and has also helped me make a lot of new friends in college. When I was KASA’s program coordinator, I made this thing called “KASA orchestra” and it was just a bunch of members/friends who haven’t played their instruments in years coming together to practice random anime OST’s and performing it for a small talent show. We didn’t sound that great, but as people say, it’s not about the result, it’s about the friends you made along the way :’)

Feel free to checkout some of my stuff here lol: https://musescore.com/user/21113101/sheetmusic