From one line on a measure to three

• Aug 1, 2012 - 01:30

Hello,
I am a pretty well experienced percussionist (3-4 years now) and have been using MuseScore for about 2 Months.
I am in the Marching Band at my school and play Marching Crash Cymbals.
When we received our sheet music and the audio files for the show, I listened to it and they didn't match up. I later found out that in the audio versions of the songs in the show, and what we will be playing, are all of the songs but mixed up. For example, the opener (audio) is the first half of one of the songs (sheet music) and the last half of a different song (sheet music). I am trying to rewrite the sheet music, so that it shows what we're actually playing, rather than skipping from one song to another. All of our (the Cymbal Players) sheet music has parts for two cymbal players, meaning 3 lines to a staff and the x's are in the spaces; except one of the songs.
And now for my question: Is there a way to have a staff start out with one line, for one cymbal part, and then, changing to 3 lines, for 2 cymbal parts, mid-song?

Note: This is my first time using a forum of any kind.


Comments

You could define two instruments in the Create Score dialogue.

One with single line percussion
The other with 3 line percussion.

You would then need to edit the 3 line drumset to suit your circumstances (see my Video Tutorial on that here: http://www.organspider.me.uk/MuseScoreTut.html )

Enter the notes into the relevant parts

Use the Hide Empty Staves setting to remove the empty bars.

HTH
MIchael

In reply to by MResendes

Was my video tutorial no help?

I know it was for the 5 line drumset, but it applies equally to the 3 line drumset.

If you've hit a brick wall, let me know and I'll see if I can sort a custom Drumset for you.

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

Sorry for the delayed response. I was actually at Marching Band Practice all day.

I'm not exactly which tutorial you wanted me to find, but I found Musescore VideoTutorial: 1. Editing the Drum Palette, and that sounds right, due to relevance to this forum string. Anyway the tutorial helped to some extent, but since these are Crash Cymbals under Marching Percussion, I don't thing using the General MIDI thing will help.

As for what I'm trying to do: I need 3 lines on a staff and the notes in the spaces. So I will need to make a drumset with two of everything, i.e. Full Crash (High) and Full Crash (Low), High-Hat (High) and High-Hat (Low), each with one on the top space and one on the bottom space.
Also, I've tried doing that with a pitched instrument (Piano); I set to three lines and placed the notes, but the 3 lines they gave me were the F, B, and E lines (Top, middle, and bottom of a full staff). So the notes were small when inbetween the lines. Would there be a way to give me the D, B, and G lines (second, third, and fourth from the top) OR even make the notes bigger to fit the over sized spaces?

Thank You. This is really helping me.

In reply to by MResendes

So you're using the Drumline Soundfont then?

There are 2 crash cymbals in the GM set, plus a splash cymbal and chinese cymbal so there are 4 to choose from.

But only 1 Hihat - what use is being made of the Hihat is it being choked with the pedal? Or just used closed?

In the meantime I'll have a look inside the Drumline SOundfont and see what's in there.

In reply to by MResendes

OK, the good news is that there is plenty of scope for adding to the Drumline keymappings.
The current cymbals set only uses one octave of the white notes.

It would therfore be perfectly possible to program a second set into the Cymbals instrument with a lower (or higher) pitch range.

So if you can indicate which cymbal sounds you will be needing I'll tweak the Drumline Soundfont for you to suit and provide you with a DRM file which means you can just go ahead and enter the notes.

In reply to by MResendes

OK thanks - there is a Smash in the Soundfont

I will try and sort something for you over the weekend :)

Although I know a little about general percussion (it was my 4th instrument at college) sadly Marching Percussion is a totally new area of the field for me :)

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

Ok. I'm still new to this. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe I was supposed to put that file in C:/Program_Files/MuseScore/sound

Also, I'm not exactly sure what you sent me. If it was in layman's terms, would it be the key for the drumset or something like that?
Thank you.

In reply to by MResendes

What I sent you is the SoundFont containing the samples which give the sounds.

You are right in thinking that it should go in C:/Program_Files/MuseSCore/sound

You will need to unpack it first though with a copy of sfArk.

You will also need to set it as the current SOundfont in the SYnthesiser page of MuseSCore.

sfArk ist the default soundfont compression we use in the SoundFont project, as it is more easily available then SFPack.

We use it because it squashes things down extremely well - the original SF2 file is over 25MB and sfArk got it down to just over 7MB.

If you have difficulty getting hold of sfArk let me know and I'll post a link.

HTH
Michael

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

OK all is done :)

Attached are 2 different drumset files one for if you are writing the cymbals on 2 staves and one if you are writing the 2 cymbal parts on 1 stave together with example mscz files.

To load the drumset, select the first bar then choose "Edit Drumset" from the right click context menu. Then choose load from the dialogue and point it to where you saved the file.

I've also attached the key mappings in Keymap2.ods which is a LibreOffice Calc file

Come back here if you need more help :)

Regards
Michael

Attachment Size
Cymbals1Stave.drm 3.61 KB
Cymbals2stave.drm 3.63 KB
Cymbals1Stave.mscz 2.08 KB
Cymbals2Stave.mscz 1.91 KB
KeyMap2.ods 11.59 KB

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.