Add native sounds for Hand Drums

• Nov 4, 2016 - 16:10

Hi again-
I've been recently playing hand drums, including frame drums (tars), riq, doumbeks, and more. I was wondering if there is a way to add native sounds for these? Frame Drums are set to be tom toms, but you can make many more sounds than simply one. Doums, Taks, Pas, and more. Any way to add these? I could record them...


Comments

In reply to by Ryan Bredeson

If you do a search of this forum for "soundfont editor", you'll find the names of two or three popular programs - Vie(n)na and Polyphone - and feedback on each. You can then download whichever sounds like the best fit for you and ask more questions on the forums for the program you chose, if the documentation for that program is not sufficient.

But by all means, do a general search for soundfonts that already exist, as there may already be ones that meet your needs. If you find one, simply see the documentation for MuseScore (the Handbook, available via the Help menu from within MuseScore or in the sidebar menu at right of this page) to learn how to use that soundfont with MuseScore.

Hi Ryan,

Yes, sadly the GM drum implementation is sadly limited for producing all the available sounds even from a basic snare drum.

Rather than using Polyphone or Viena to produce a soundfont, I would be inclined to use the SFZ format to produce an instrument to use with Zerberus.

The soundfont format has many limitations regarding percussion implementations, one of the biggest being the ability to stop sample playback when another is played, which means things like cymbal choking, pedal hihat, and many of the muting effects used with hand drums or djembes are very difficult to reproduce.

Also the great improvements to the Zerberus SFZ player introduced in this year's Google Summer of Code by hpfmn mean that future versions of MuseScore will have a much better SFZ player than before, to the extent that using SFZ will be preferable over an SF2 soundfont.

Anyway whatever you decide to do, if you need help or advice with the soundfont creation process, do feel free to contact me.

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

A first step would be to choose one of the frame drum, record samples and put them under a liberal license (like CC0). Not sure exactly which samples would be needed though. Probably several per sound at difference volume.
Once done, we could write a sfz file.

Then repeat with another drum.

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