Guitar slap playback?

• Feb 7, 2017 - 21:08

I'm trying to write a guitar part, in standard notation, for 'More Than Words' by Extreme. How do you get a guitar to play a slap, or muted note, in Musescore 2.0?


Comments

If you have a particular sound in a particular soundfont you want MuseScore to use, you can add an instrument change text from the Text palette to tell MuseScore to change sounds at that point. If you don't already have a specific sound in mind, you mgiht need to first find an appropriate soundfont.

Most likely, you'll find the amount of effort makes it not really worthwhile just to get that extra degree of realism in the computer-generated playback. Keep in mind, the primary purpose of MuseScore is to produce notation; the computer-generated playback is just there to help give you some idea of how it will sound when ultimately played by real musicians.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Wow! That was crazy fast! Thank you so much! I tried to follow the steps from the link you provided but in my case, the only thing I can select from the drop down menu is "normal". I don't have any other option as it is the case with the example you povided. How do I add these other channels?

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Ooh okay, thank you. I get it now, sorry! Just why is it explained that way in the offical handbook if it doesn't actually work and you still need to manually tweak your instrument definition?

Also I dont't quite understand why somethind so seemingly simple is that difficult. I mean the standard GM soundfonts already provide those muted souds. Why is it impossible to use them in a meaningful way? You can set them as your standard sound which is fair enough but which song only uses muted strings? Muted sounds are usually something that occurs only at specific moments in a song while the rest is played normally. But since you can't implement it that way it makes the muted sound library pretty useless.

In reply to by mapf

Now ? ...you mention TABS ?
;-)

Co-opting the violin instrument is admittedly a workaround for the lack of natively available guitar channels. For the treble clef, the only problem is that some of the lowest guitar notes may display as red (i.e. out of the violin's range). This does not affect printout. (Remember, MuseScore is primarily a score writer.)
Also, in Edit / Preferences / Note Input tab, you can uncheck 'Color notes out of usable pitch range' so they won't display as red in the MuseScore window.

Alternate guitar tunings do not have an effect on treble clef notation, but they are obviously important for TAB. Unfortunately, in Staff Properties, the string data for violin can not be edited (unlike for guitar).

TAB is a relatively new feature in MuseScore... maybe someday more channels will natively (without tweaking the violin) be available for guitar.

Regards.

In reply to by Jm6stringer

Thank you! You guys have a crazy active community apparently, pretty cool! And I'm sorry but I wasn't aware that it would be important to mention that I was using TABs and a different tuning since I thought the topic was quite unrelated to that. I mean it's only important because of the way the workaround works but I didn't know that beforehand^^

I know MuseScore is primarily a score writer but I think the playback option is super helpful. Like in my case I am trying to transcript a song from a video and being able to instantly play back what I wrote down helps a lot to check if I got it right.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I tried that by shamelessly copying my score onto your staff but I somehow failed to get it to work. It was kinda wierd tbh. Because when I played back your parts it would work the way it was intentioned but when I came to my part on playback the notes would sound normal and only if you clicked on them they would make the muted sound. Maybe a bug? Does your template only work when the sound is changed for a whole measure maybe? Because I only wanted to mute a couple of notes per measure.

In reply to by mapf

If you start with a string quartet and delete everything but the unwanted violins you can use tabs and edit string data. For some reason the instruments in the string quartet come with string data. If you want up to 4 guitars, you can actually keep all four instruments and edit each one. You can add linked tabs to these also. As a bonus the strings pick up those defined in the guitar. You will need to change clefs on the last two guitar staves.

Here is a template you could use with 4 alternate string definitions.

Attachment Size
guitar quartet.mscz 10.27 KB

In reply to by mike320

Hey, thanks for your suggestion! I'm not entirely sure if I got it right though. So you would say whenever I want to use muted sounds I simply one of the other guitars / a different staff? I guess for playback purposes that would work but I wouldn't want for the printout version to have an extra instrument just for a couple of notes. Why do you chose a string quartet as the starting point though? Why not simply add another instrument by hand? Maybe I don't get what you're suggesting after all.

EDIT: Oh also when you said, delete everything exept the unwanted violins is that a double negative? Did you mean wanted instead? I'm confused.

In reply to by mapf

I said it totally backwards. Delete any extra instruments.

The reason you don't add any instruments is that if you add a violin, there is no string data. The string quartet instruments have string data. You change them to guitar and you get your 3 channels, string data and can add tabs.

In reply to by mike320

Okay I think now I get what you mean! Thank you! I will try it out! Although in your template you already switched all the instruments to guitars which resulted in a loss of the channels which is what confused me as well. When I switched them back to violins the string data was gone.

Also I still haven't figured out how to add working TABs to violins :(

In reply to by mapf

Okay update: I managed to add linked TABs and exept for a few conversion errors (same note but on a different string for some reason) everything works, EXEPT for the muted sounds. Again they play the right sound when selected but not when the playback function is used. This is really odd. I'll add the score for reference so you can check it out if you like :)

In reply to by mike320

Thank you! Of course I forgot to attach the score... so here it is. The last two measures at the end have the muted sounds. In the second to last only the ones with the X as a note head and the last measure is supposed to be completely muted as a test, it doesn't work on replay tough.

Attachment Size
Skyfall2.mscz 40.32 KB

I tried that but as I said I somehow didn't manage to get it to work. When I clicked on the notes they would play the correct sound but on playback they would sound like normal ones. I have no idea why. Maybe I give it another try!

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