Bad percussion/drumset

• Apr 20, 2019 - 04:09
  1. Imbalance: Hi-hat too loud and bass drum too soft with same dynamics.
  2. Missing of instruments/soundfonts: Suspended cymbal, Wind chimes.
  3. Complicated drumset input mode: The piano keyboard contains all 'notes' of percussion but entering a note and pressing up and down keys skips some of the 'pitch' eg. cabasa. When you highlighted a pitch in drumset input mode, clicking in the piano keyboard always input that pitch.

Comments

Balance of a drumset is pretty subjective, some would say snare too loud, others too soft, etc. But you are free to find a soundfont you prefer and use it instead. However, the majority of the soundfonts you will find adhere to the General MIDi standard, so they will be limited to the same set of sounds as the one we use by default. Still, there are specialist ones that do have a wider variety of sounds available.

Not sure what you mean about the input, the piano keyboard should work just fine if that's your preferred method (I personally find computer keyboard shortcuts combined with the palette easier). What issues are you finding when you use the piano keyboard? It worked fine when I just tried it. It might help if you attached the score you are having problems with and describe step by step what you are doing and which step things seem to go wrong for you.

With up/down arrow keys, you can only cycle through the sounds that are included in the drumset. (Showing all sounds by default would clutter the notation & the UI.)
If you want to include e.g. Cabasa, right-click on the drum staff (or enter note input mode with N) > Edit Drumset, then select the appropriate MIDI pitch (69 / A4), and put in a name: Screenshot_2019-04-28_02-12-51.png
Sort by note number (leftmost column), and look here for values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI#Percussion

I guess shipping a complete GM (or even GS) drumset file anyone can just load would be neat. Should I make a pull request for adding a file in https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/tree/master/share/templates ?

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Hi,
Here is a first shot at it. Not very complicated.
But since we have time, maybe we could think about it a bit more.
- I separated GM1 and GM2. I think it is useless and confusing. Just using GM2, calling it "complete drumset" would certainly be better.
- I tried to put the right symbol for triangle, but the others use all the same note. Should I spread them as they are on the keyboard??
- Look like Mute is represented with a "+" above the symbol, but that is not currently available in the "Notehead group". (Surdo, triangle, Cuica and High Conga could use it) http://web.mit.edu/merolish/Public/drums.pdf
- when editing the drumset, it would be nice to play the sound.

Not really related but should they be in /style or /template ??? (existing .drm are in /template, but loading and saving open /style.)

Attachment Size
drumset-GM1.drm 6.92 KB
drumset-GM2.drm 8.89 KB
drumset-complete.mscz 8.43 KB

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