In March, we shipped a notation editor into Virtuosic Studio. It was deliberately minimal — place notes on a staff, set a clef and key, save the excerpt, assign it. Enough to be useful, not much more.
Two months later, the editor has grown into something I didn't expect to have for another year. This post is about what's new — articulations, slurs, hairpins, multi-part scores, MusicXML import and export — and about the thing we're building around it that I don't think exists in any other practice tool: per-note pitch feedback on the excerpts a teacher writes.
The Editor Grew Up
The original notation editor was good for short studies and basic exercises. Anything that needed real musical markings had to live somewhere else — Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore, a PDF, a photo of sheet music. That gap was the main feedback we heard from teachers.
The new editor closes it. You can write:
- Articulations — staccato, accent, tenuto, marcato, fermata, breath marks, and caesuras. Add them with a keystroke or the palette.
- Phrasing marks — slurs (press S) and hairpin crescendos and decrescendos (press < or >). Both render as proper engraved overlays, not approximations.
- Tuplets — triplets, quintuplets, septuplets. The bracket and number render correctly, and audio playback adjusts the timing so you can hear them.
- Mid-piece changes — time signature, key signature, and tempo changes anywhere in the piece. A yellow "applies at m. N" pill keeps the change visible while you edit.
- Pickup measures, barline styles, and structural markings — the things you'd reach for in any serious notation tool.
A few of the more complex marks (ornaments, dynamics from pp through fff) have working commands underneath but don't have palette buttons yet. They're coming. The point is that the editor is now capable of writing the music teachers actually want to assign — not just sketches of it.
Multi-Part Scores, Done Right
Real teaching material isn't always a single line on a single staff. The new editor handles:
- 28 instruments, in any combination. Add a part, pick the instrument, and the staff appears with the correct clef and transposition.
- Grand-staff piano — created automatically with the treble and bass brace whenever you add piano.
- Multi-staff instruments like organ or pitched percussion, with a bracket connector.
- Concert vs. written pitch toggle — visible only when at least one transposing instrument is in the score, so it stays out of your way until you need it.
The transposition handling is the piece I'm most proud of. Write a passage at concert pitch, see it on a Bb trumpet part written up a major second, hear it played back at the correct pitch. The metadata travels with the excerpt, so when you assign it to a student, the notation displays on their device in the correct transposition for the instrument they play.
Bring Your Library With You
If you've been using Sibelius, Finale, or MuseScore, you have a library of teaching material that probably represents years of work. Asking you to abandon it isn't reasonable.
The new editor exports any excerpt as a MusicXML 4.0 partwise file — the universal interchange format every major notation tool reads. Pitches, articulations, slurs, hairpins, tuplets, dynamics, signatures, multi-part backups, and transposing instruments all survive the export. Open the file in Sibelius and it looks like Sibelius wrote it.
It works in reverse too. Import a MusicXML file from any major notation software, and it renders inside Studio with its markings intact. You can attach it to an assignment immediately. For now, editing an imported MusicXML happens in the classic editor or by re-exporting it after changes — full round-trip editing inside the new editor is on the roadmap.
The benefit is simple: your existing teaching material works inside Virtuosic on day one. You don't have to choose between your library and our tools.
Playback That Helps You Teach
Every excerpt plays back inside the editor using Tone.js synthesis. A one-measure count-in click leads in, tempo is adjustable from 20 to 300 BPM, and the currently-playing note highlights in gold as playback moves through the piece. It's not a recording-studio synthesizer — the goal is reference, not realism — but it's good enough to verify that what you wrote sounds like what you meant.
For a student opening the assignment on their phone or iPad, that same playback is the click track they practice against. They see the notation, they hear the count-in, and they play with the tuner active. Every aspect of the experience is designed around the fact that the student will be practicing this with real-time pitch feedback running.
Which brings us to the thing this is all building toward.
The Closed Loop
Here is the part that doesn't exist in any other practice tool:
A teacher writes a 16-bar etude. They tag it as a lyrical exercise for beginning trumpet students. They assign it to a student. The student opens it on their device, hits play, and works through the passage with Virtuosic's tuner running. Every note they play gets logged against the specific note in the score the teacher wrote — not just "an F4 in your practice session" but "the F4 in measure 8, beat 3, in Lyrical Etude #4, assigned last Tuesday."
The teacher reopens the excerpt and toggles on an intonation heatmap. Every note in the score has a color chip below it — green where the student played in tune, yellow at ±10 cents, red at ±20 or worse. Hover any chip and see the average cents deviation, the direction (sharp or flat), and the number of attempts. Filter to one student and see how Sarah specifically is doing on that high C leap she keeps missing. Toggle to the class aggregate and see whether the whole trumpet section drags in the third measure.
That feedback loop — write music, assign it, get per-note intonation data on how every student plays it — does not exist in Sibelius. It does not exist in SmartMusic. It does not exist in any practice app I've found.
The teacher-side rendering of the heatmap is built. The composition tools and the assignment workflow are built. The backend tables that store per-note pitch observations are built. The endpoint that receives them is built.
What is not built yet is the student-side capture — the part of the practice app that binds the tuner's live pitch data to the specific note in the score being played and posts it. That is the next ship. Once it lands, the loop closes, and teachers see real heatmaps on real student attempts.
I'm telling you this is the next ship because I want to be honest about where the feature stands today. Studio teachers can use the new editor right now to write rich, properly-marked excerpts, assign them to students, and see completion rates. The intonation heatmap component renders the moment student data starts flowing. The composition side is here. The feedback side is on the way.
What You Can Do Today
If you're on Studio, the new editor is live in your dashboard at virtuosic.org/studio. Try the keyboard shortcuts (N for note mode, R for rest, S for slur, T for triplet, 3–9 for durations). Import a MusicXML file you've been using elsewhere and see how it renders. Add a multi-part score with a transposing instrument and toggle between concert and written pitch.
If you're a teacher who's been waiting for a real notation tool inside the same app where your students practice, I'd love to hear what you'd want next. The roadmap is long — multi-voice on a single staff, ties, lyrics, chord symbols, rehearsal letters, copy and paste — and the order it ships in is heavily shaped by what teachers actually ask for.
— Forrest
Ready to try it? Virtuosic Studio ($250/year) includes the new notation editor, MusicXML import and export, the excerpt library, and all the assignment, scheduling, and analytics tools that come with the Studio tier. The editor is live in your dashboard right now.
For more on what Studio enables, see Write It, Assign It, Play It: Notation Comes to Virtuosic Studio, Why Your Practice App Should Connect You to Your Teacher, and The Features That Set Virtuosic Apart.