Snare rolls again
I'd really, really like if there was a snare roll sound somewhere. It has been asked before and will be asked again on a regular basis.
The thing is that I have some orchestral scores (wind orchestra) and everything sounds just great. Though my purpose is to write scores for a real orchestra, the sound that MuseScore outputs is so good that it works very well as demos for various purposes. Now I feel that the only thing that doesn't work is the drum part. How hard would it be to create a snare roll sound? Most of the drum sounds are short beats. But how would a continuous snare roll sound differ from a continuous trumpet sound playing 440 Hz? Sure, the 440 Hz sound could have 100 samples looping at 44 kHz, while the continuous snare roll sound, if looped, would need a lot more samples to avoid a distinguishable pitch. I'd imagine one could loop a sequence of a snare roll that would correspond to the single drum stick beats, say 10 Hz.
It would ease up a lot, if these snare roll sounds would automatically attach to any snare note with the three-slant tremolo, but I'd welcome even other solutions that would require more manual work. Like having a parallel staff that played these snare roll sounds.
Comments
use a tremolo. It won't playback though.
There are some tricks to get them to work, see e.g. http://musescore.org/en/node/8223, somehwere furter down the thread.
In reply to use a tremolo. It won't by Jojo-Schmitz
I've tried some of these tricks that play the normal snare sound as some 32nd notes, but they are kind of too mathematically perfect. A lot of work to produce a very stressed and tensed peculiar buzz sound. Sure one could spend more time on it to get it sound better. Anyway, the ideal would still be to have a (sampled) long lasting snare roll sound in the soundfonts, that could be used as any sustained instrument sound, sounding as long as the note value says it should sound.
Adding a drum roll sound to a soundfont isn't hard at all, and I suspect some soundfonts already have this. But it's not a standard GM sound, so the soundfont provided with MuseScore has no room for it. As you may notice if you browse around this forum, there has been some talk of creating a better extended soundfont for MuseScore some day, and I'd assume there would be room for a drum roll sound or two there.
In reply to Adding a drum roll sound to a by Marc Sabatella
Clicketyclick
I've examined it with Audacity, trying to find something loopable. I guess the problem is that while you can loop 100 samples to create a 440 Hz sound of any instrument, you just can't loop anything from a snare roll sound without making it sound like an engine, unless you loop a really long section. The linked sound above contains drum stick hits at some 15 to 25 Hz. Guess the natural sounding snare roll requires the hit frequency to vary. And the sound font technology might not support this at all, don't know.
I tried looping different lengths of the sample and got a rather good sounding loop, the length of which was 0.6 seconds. So that's some 25,000 samples. Does that even work in a soundfont sound?
In reply to Adding a drum roll sound to a by Marc Sabatella
I subdivide any note using the COntrol + number option - gives a pretty fair roll although it is not in standard drum roll notation
See attachment
There are two notes I can pick for the snare. One is acoustic, one is electric. I'd never need both of them in one score. I guess I'd never use the electric at all. Would it work, if I'd replace the electric snare sound with a snare roll sound that I found in another soundfont. The roll sound is like a sustainable sound and I'd imagine I'd get a roll with the length of the note I use. A single snare shot sounds the same whether I write a crotchet, a minim or a breve.
So I would have to use a soundfont editor, open the default soundfont that MuseScore uses, open the other sound font with the snare roll and somehow locate the electric snare shot and replace it with the snare roll.
If this works, I could pick the acoustic snare note for single hits and the electric snare note each time I need the roll. I still would have to add the tremolo sign onto the stem of the note. And I might have to replace the single snare hit, too, and maybe some other drum sounds, too, to make the whole drum/percussion set sound more even. Would this work?
In reply to There are two snare notes by jotti
What I would do jotti is allocate your snare roll to a note outside the GM drumset range.
The GM drumset only allocates notes 36 to 81 to percussion sounds, which leaves ample room for adding extra sounds like snare rolls above or below this.
One GM module I had allocated a snare roll to a note below the GM set
It may also be advisable to avoid the Roland GS allocations which can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_GS#Drum_kits
HTH
MIchael