'Edit Drumset' is very counter-intuitive but also resets in Musescore 2
Hi guys,
I'm starting with drum notation in musescore, and I find it quite hard to use this program. I want to write music only for a standard jazz kit. So there is no need for cowbell, 4 toms, 2 rides, etc. I want a very simple and basic drumset that only shows the elements that I will use.
So I customized this, by editing the notation to the way I like it (height of ride/hihat etc), and set up some shortcuts (A,B,C,D etc). This step is already quite counter-intuitive; the order which is shown at the bottom is not the same order of the field you see when you click 'Edit Drumset'. Also you can't hear the sounds in that field, so you have to hope that you are editing the correct Bassdrum (there are two which cannot be distinguished). So there is some improvement possible there.
But my real problem is, once I did this counter-intuitive editing (it is possible), I cleared some of the entries in the bottom (the cowbell and stuff that I don't need) and gave them my preferred order. When you close the program or click 'Edit Drumset', this order resets and all the cleared items reappear! This makes it really unhandy for me to work with this, since basically it means that either it is not customizable, or I have to clear and reset the order every time I open the program.
Anyone knows how to fix this? Or maybe it's not fixable yet?
Thanks!
Comments
For the record - the order shown in the palette is the standard General MIDI ordering for drumset pitches. You can get "edit drumset" to show that same order by clicking the header for that field. This used to be the defult, but people complained it wasn't a very useful order, so the default was changed to alphabetic - reverse so the empty entries would be on the bottom.
It's indeed unfortunate that the General MIDI folks didn't come up with something more reasonable for the ordering, but it is what it is. In the future, we may provide the ability to customize the ordering in the palette. It's actually already doable by editing the instruments.xml file directly - this change was made only a couple of weeks ago - but not very convenient either.
Anyhow, though, great that you figured out how to customize your drumset definition. probably what you haven't realized it that this drumset is specific to that score. So it is definitely remembered every time you edit that score, but won't apply to others. In other to apply drum custom drumset to other scores, you can either use the save/load buttons in the drumset editor, or save a score as a Template and then create future scores from that.