More on percussion notation

• Jan 16, 2012 - 13:07

Hi,
I've started using MuseScore on OSx recently and find it to be a fantastic piece of software with only two drawbacks, so far. I shall present them in reverse order of importance (to my mind).

I write for a band with a line up incorporating a wide range of world percussion instruments, along with the more common guitars, ukulele, keys, trumpet and vocals, so the ability to score percussion differently by allocating lines on staves to different tones (or another approach, note 2) would be of great benefit.

1) As has been mentioned previously, many of the percussion instruments do not sound right (the congas have only two tones it seems, where I usually get 5-6 distinct tones from each conga (approx. 20 tones from 4 congas) in my acoustic set up. I have noticed that there should be a third conga sound according to the instruments.xml file but I have not found a method of using it). I appreciate that this could be resolved by using a soundfont editor and will endeavour to create soundfonts for each of my drums to create my own 'kit'.

2) For world percussion TUBS (Time unit box system) is commonly used for notation. The option of adding a piano roll with percussion instrument (note) assignment would certainly make this much easier. In TUBS each drum typically has it's own line with the pattern duration divided into equal sized boxes which contain instruction on the striking method for the drum. These boxes are all equal to the shortest beat used in the piece. I find this type of notation to be essential when working with polyrhythmic percussion ensembles.
An alternative method for writing TUBS is to assign a line for each drum sound and mark a strike with an X. This would probably be much easier to implement as the mnemonics for percussion strikes are not standardized (this method often used in midi composition software which does not provide classical scoring, eg. propellerhead's Reason).

Implementation of TUBS and/or manual assignment of percussive tones to a 5 line or 10 line staff would be incredibly helpful.

Thanks and regards,
Munki


Comments

"Manual assignment of percussive tones to a 5 line"

Do you know about "drumset" in MuseScore?
Create a Drum 5 lines score, right click on the staff -> Edit drumset

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.