Musescore Drumline problem
So I just downloaded Musescore Drumline, and while the sound playback is generally really good, there is one unwanted feature. If you input even, unaccented notes, this weird and seemingly random dynamic accent will play back. So far I've found this with MDL_SnareLine, MDL_TenorLine, and MDL_BassLine. Is this a supposed to be a feauture, or is it a solvable problem?
Comments
Can you attach the score with the problem?
I understand the new soundfont does include some variation between notes for added realism. There shouldn't be notes that really stand out though, and I don't hear anything aside from normal variation when when I try.
In reply to Can you attach the score… by Marc Sabatella
Here's the example I made. I tried different beat divisions. Tenor line is pretty good, very little volume variation there, but snare line is pretty bad and the bass line is borderline unusable. As you can imagine, this decreases the effectiveness of our written accents greatly. The top-level marching percussion ensembles and drum corps spend a great deal of time eliminating the unevenness of sound, so the intended 'realism' shown here does quite the contrary. Is there a way of removing the effect of this ourselves, or will you consider lessening the extent of it?
In reply to Here's the example I made. I… by alexfanetti22
I guess such things are subjective. To me the snare sounds best - a very natural variation. But the bass line is indeed a bit odd-sounding, not so much a different in volume but in timbre. Worth reporting as an issue.
Anyhow, I'm not really the expert here, but the SFZ files for the soundfonts are plain text and in theory you could edit them to remove the offending variants. You'd need to read up on how SFZ works, or wait for someone more knowledge than I to chime in here...
Hey Alex,
Our main objective with this first release of MDL is to get this out, get things working smoothly in general, then get a new release of MDL out within the next week that fine tunes the sound playback based on requests from the community.
The great thing with the next extensions feature is that we can very easily release an update to MDL and people will get a notification that it is available the next time they open up MuseScore and it is delivered seamlessly.
You can expect that this will be continually updated, getting better and better as time goes on.
To provide a bit of insight into how this works from a technical perspective, for every single hit or articulation we recorded 4 left and 4 right samples. These are alternating to sound more realistic. We can adjust and fine tune the pitch, timing and velocity of each sample until it is absolutely perfect. :-)
As much feedback and details as you wish to give for each instrument and desired result, we'll do our best to fine tune and get an update out as soon as we can.
In reply to Hey Alex,… by Daniel
I totally understand. And this feature is certainly a thoughtful and cool one, but without some additional features, it might not have the desired effect. I think that if it were possible to make written sticking have an effect on the sample being played, it could make this work. And with that, diddle (tremelo) notation could have an impact on the sample as well, with one diddle playing two notes of the same sample, but the second being softer than the first. I don't know if this is feasible as far as programming goes.
Whether you consider my ideas or not, I think it would good to remember to make these features minor touches, and not very prominent. It shouldn't affect our written accents in any way.
Thanks.
In reply to I totally understand. And… by alexfanetti22
Already considering.... so, the diddle triggering a distinct sample, I'll try to get those in this week. That is something we can update in MDL without having to update code in the core application. This can be done in the SFZ programming.
About sticking having an impact on samples, this is a pretty significant feature. It can possibly be done in 3.0.
The great thing about MuseScore is that you can just make a request if you have an idea. Just post the request in the Feature Request forums - https://musescore.org/en/forum/7 :-)
In reply to Already considering.... so,… by Daniel
Great, I will certainly post my suggestions to that forum.
By the way, great work on MDL. This extension, along with future updates, will definitely make musescore a top contender for any serious percussion coordinator.