Creating a handbell soundfont
Hi all, I've posted about this before and I see there are a handful of other posts about it. I arrange handbell music but Musescore doesn't have a good sound for handbells. I approximate it using the vibraphone sound, but it's just not the same. I finally have access to a full 5 octave set of Schulmerich handbells, and am working on a video project with them so I thought why not make a soundfont in the process? I found the tutorial page about making soundfonts, and it seems fairly straightforward, but I'm a little confused on a couple of things:
-Do I need to record every pitch, or can I just record one to get the waveform and Musescore will fill in the pitches for me?
-Do I need to record multiple note lengths? Or can I just record one long note and it will be adjusted based on the note lengths in the score?
-How do I go about adding bell articulations? This is a little more specialized and may be beyond my capability, but I know strings have pizz. and brass has a mute effect so I think it would be similar to that.
Hope what I'm asking makes sense. I love Musescore, and I've been using it to help my bell choir practice during COVID. It would be even more helpful for us if I can make a good soundfont! I even taught a class about it for our virtual Spring Ring event a couple months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMQNunn9g-I
Comments
I'm afraid my reply isn't very helpful because I don't have any experience on it. Probably you're aware of: https://musescore.org/en/node/13734. After a short research for Polyphone there exist for example some tutorials: https://www.polyphone-soundfonts.com/documentation/en.
In reply to I'm afraid my reply isn't… by kuwitt
Duh, should have checked Polyphone's website to see if they had a tutorial (which of course they do). Looks like bells will be a bit challenging since they're technically a pitched percussion instrument and looping the sound isn't simple due to the volume decay.
In reply to Duh, should have checked… by AvenueQ
You may not need to loop the sound; you could use long decay samples. You don't need to sample every pitch and Polyphone is a great tool for the job.
I think that the SF2 format is getting a bit long in the tooth but until MS moves away from it then it's probably worth making, (and sharing!), a good soundfont for handbells. You would benefit from a decent microphone for making your samples.