Muller Monthly Music Meta, March MMXXV

Title: “Pitch Outs”by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous singer and actress.
Answer: JULIE ANDREWS, found by 557 solvers
Solving time: 15 minutes (Matt G.)

March Muller Meta, and Pete + gang are gently leading us into spring with another gettable-even-for-new-solvers meta (so if you know any potential MMMM fans, send them this one).

My solve was similar to last month’s: scanning, nothing, scanning, nothing, scanning…aha!

No obvious theme entries in this 17×13 grid, so time to scan-scan-scan for anything sus. I noticed a few repeaty parts in the longer entries (meaning 8 letters; only thing longer in the grid is a solitary 9, WYATT EARP). Then I saw the pattern and musical notes leapt off the page at me like that scene in “A Beautiful Mind” except letters instead of numbers.

In this case it was seeing two MI bigrams in MIAMI SOL at 19-A, and then the triple-threat LA LA LAND next to it. Those are both musical notes, which seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, and then two more in LA LAW at 60-A. And then they were everywhere! Where’s my Oscar? Russell got one for having this stuff jump off the blackboard at him. DO – TI – MI SOL on the top row…then nothing on the second row? What? But then that third row with seven (!) notes? Cue scene with crazed clue of mad genius in slow motion finally recognizing the pattern, along with standard slow-motion shot of coffee cup or papers or whatever they had in their hand dropping to floor (OK that’s “The Usual Suspects” too but you get the idea).

And the clever idea is: on the rows that have musical notes, use everything on the line *except* the musical notes. On rows without a note, ignore the row. So we get:

Row 1: JUdo tiL miL solE = JULIE
Row 2: ignore
Row 3: miAmi SOL lalalaND. What a nice find on MIAMI SOL, leaving only the one letter. = AND
Row 4: ignore
Row 5: ignore
Row 6: Hmm, I’m a little lost here. We’re only using the R from laRdo, but ignoring both MAR and UBS.
Row 7: ignore
Row 8: ignore
Row 9: ignore
Row 10: ignore
Row 11: retiE lalaW fareS

Take those unused letters on the four lines with notes and you get contest answer JULIE ANDREWS, fitting for obvious reasons! 4.60 stars, deducting a few style points for that Row 6 thing (though it was probably unavoidable and not an oversight.

Nice work from our meta-team! I’m 3-for-3 in 2025, and aim to keep it rolling in April. Until then!