How do you save an instrument template?

• Feb 17, 2018 - 22:52

I designed rough templates of Bandora and Opharion, instruments not seen today which were very popular in Elizabethan times. They took up 2/3 of Barley's 1597 "New Booke of Tablature." I did both standard and tab versions, then I just saved them each as .mscz files. Then I wanted to use them both in one score, and was stuck. How to load the presets I spent so much time on, both together? Obviously there must be some method for putting instruments into the Edit>Instruments dialog, which would seem to be the fix I'm looking for, but I don't see any obvious way to do that.
The short term fix I came up with was to save all my non-standard instruments in one big score, then start with that score and just delete what I wasn't going to use. This seems inelegant, though.

Bandora Standard and Tablature Rough Template.mscz
Opharion Standard and Tablature Rough Template.mscz

Also, is there some way to submit instrument solutions for other users to save them from re-inventing the wheel? Or, is there some page I haven't found that does this already?

Thanks for your kind efforts on my behalf,
both in the past and now.

C. A. Powers
MKA Charric Van der Vliet
redbranch9@gmail.com
http://sgtc.20megsfree.com/Albums/Charric%20Albums.html

Comments

• Feb 18, 2018 - 08:24

Unfortunately, this simply saves the score in a place easy to access from inside the program. It does nothing to fix the problem of adding a custom instrument to an existing score while you are working on it. Say, if you had a custom bandora part, and you suddenly realize halfway through that you need that custom opharion part added on. You cannot add a score to a score. Luckily, I grok .xml as I used to make a living at it. See the attached instrument file. The bottom six instruments in the .xml file are the three instruments used by the "New Book of Tablature" in 1597, along with their tabs. The group, which is in early music, has an NBT label to indicate the usage there.
This is the change I was looking for from the software. It really would be nice if the changes in Staff Properties or other aspects of an instrument could be simply saved by highlighting the instrument as changed in the right-hand side of the instrument dialog and then tap a button that says "Save Instrument As..." and asks you for a unique instrument name if the label you have put in front of the staff isn't. Then, when you open a new score, or open the instrument dialog, the saved custom instrument would be there for inclusion in other scores. You could make user added instruments into it's own "Custom Instruments Group" for instance.

Attachment Size
instrumentsEliz.xml 460.3 KB

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