Incorrect pitched percussion instrument default ranges in Instruments.xml

• May 16, 2016 - 06:05
Reported version
3.0
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project

In Musescore 2.0.3, there are several pitched percussion instruments that have an excessively narrow "professional" range in the default instruments.xml

Findings I have:
* Marimba has "Amateur" of C3–C7 and "Professional" from F2–C7. The "usual" marimba in the wild is a 4⅓ octave model that's from A2–C7, so that should be the new "Amateur" range. For "professional" marimba literature, the modern standard is typically 5 octaves from C2–C7, though custom instruments exist that have range of up to A1–C8.
* The "bass marimba" (really more of a contrabass) has a few errors. First, it's a single-staff instrument with a bracket that appears by default. Second, its professional range is all wonky, with the highest pitch being listed to the left of the lowest pitch, which causes *every* note to be highlighted in red. Basing my "professional" range on the contrabass instrument made by Planet Marimba, an A0–C4 would be a good approximate range.
* The Glockenspiel should add a note or 3 to the bottom end of the "professional" range. There are fairly common F5–C8 models available, and I know that instruments that go down to E5 are not unheard of.
* Tubular Bells have a good range, though there is a (presumably very rare) bass chimes set (Adams is one such manufacturer) that would bring the low end down to F3 or thereabouts
* Xylophone: both "amateur" and "professional" models usually go all the way up to C8
* Timpani: the range of D2–C4 is a good amateur range. However, you could tune the large drum to a C2 and you could also get a 20" timpano that could hit a D4, so the professional range should be expanded to C2–D4
* FYI: crotales and vibraphone both have good default ranges, so they don't need any tweaking

I'll set this as "needs info" in case anyone has further discussion on the exact ranges that should be used. Should I also submit this as an issue over on GitHub?

GIT commit: 3c7a69d


Comments

FWIW, this is the proper place to submit bug reports and feature requests for MuseScore. GitHub is just for the source code itself as far as I know.

Adding myself to fix this—will wait for a little bit to see if anyone else had feedback before I submit any changes.

Thanks. Do you know if there's a way to edit the OP of an issue? I want to convert the formatting of the topic of this issue from HTML to Markdown so it looks nicer and can't seem to find the edit button for the top post.

Status (old) needs info patch (code needs review)
Reported version 2.1 3.0

I've edited my Instruments.xml to have better percussion ranges and add a single-staff marimba option (see issue #111431 for the attachment or this diff on github. If my changes here look good, I'll go create a pull request.

Status (old) patch (code needs review) fixed

darn, I screw up the commit message :-(

Fixed in branch master, commit 39ed0ec470
and branch 2.0.4, commit 4f73232694

fix #111431 and fix #111311: some additions/corrections to instruments.xml