Bowing is caring: introducing annotations on Newzik Web

Have you ever dreamt of marking up your digital sheet music from any device? This is now possible through Newzik Web! A brand new set of annotation tools now enables marking parts up with text, symbols and drawings.

Let’s have a closer look at how it can help you in your musical journey.

Start marking up your music

High marks in productivity

Let’s say you are practicing a tough piece for a concert that is coming up. With Newzik Web, you can highlight difficult passages to remember to focus on them during your next practice session. Always miss that B flat in that fast ascending lick? Stamping a big red flat symbol there should help…

Are you a singer? Use the text tool to write down translations for your lyrics. You can even use a white pencil to white out the original text.

Ready for the big day? Grab your iPad or print your part, and jump on stage!

Share the fun

Combine the new annotation tools and Newzik’s collaborative projects, and you’re opening up a world of possibilities.

As a teacher, this means being able to remotely mark up a student’s music - to comment on a recording they’ve made, for example.

As a music librarian in an orchestra, you will be able to prepare sheet music at lightning speed: share a layer for bowings with your principal violin, and then use symbols to copy up-bows and down bows on the other string parts.
Open Newzik Web in two windows, with a different part in each, for maximum efficiency! Thanks to real-time sharing in collaborative projects, string players will automatically receive their annotated parts for them to practice - on Newzik Web, on their iPad, or after having printed them on paper.

A complete set of annotation tools

Marking up digital parts in Newzik Web is very easy: click on the new “Annotate” button in the the top bar of the score view, and select one of the tools to start annotating.

Among the tools available, you will find pre-made symbols (or “stamps”), a text tool, and pencils, in various sizes and colors. If you own a laptop or tablet with a touch screen, you can even use it to draw on your music!

And just like everything in Newzik, all your annotations are saved in the Newzik Cloud, so that you don’t ever have to worry about losing your precious work.

Protip: use keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between annotation tools (A for selection, S for symbols, T for text, P for pencil and L for layers).

Thanks to layers, you can group your markings and hide or show them at will. How about one layer for fingerings, and another one for performance notes?

Start marking up your music

What’s next?

We’re not going to stop here! Soon, you’ll be able to select multiple annotations to delete them, move them around or copy and paste them somewhere else. Undo/redo actions are also on their way.

Need to learn more about this feature? Check out our knowledge base article.