Tremolo Plugin - Writing a plugin to adjust instrument variant tremolo playback

• Jan 10, 2021 - 04:48

I have created a custom soundfont and custom drum instrument - highland snare drum, which uses a closed buzz roll. The instruments,xml definition I made has two different sounds, a tap and a buzz, and the buzz is set up as a tremolo variant of the tap.

Playback of a "tremolo" note in my music with this setup only gives me a single "buzz" sample.

I want the playback to do 3 (triplet pulse) buzzes in the space of a single tremolo note using the buzz sample in my sound font. I'd be ok with just getting it to play my buzz sample in the standard (4 pulses for r16) machine-gun style though, as it will sound much closer to what I'm looking for.

I'm hoping to write a plugin for this that modifies the tremolo-denoted playback to be more similar to the standard (non-variant) tremolo playback, and if I can control the number of tremolo divisions, even better (but ok if I can't).

I would appreciate some direction, since I can't find any info in the forums regarding plugins that adjust tremolo playback. So either I'm the first to try.....or it's not possible and requires a feature request.

Things I've tried:
- Modifying my soundfont sample to add three pulses unfortunately doesn't work because musescore playback adds substantial decay, plus the buzz pulses in the sample won't be in proper time as soon as the tempo or tremolo note length changes.

Here is a snip of my instruments.xml code:

<Drum pitch="55"> <!--MDL Snare Samples-->
    <head>normal</head>
    <line>-1</line>
    <voice>0</voice>
    <name>tapR</name>
    <stem>2</stem>
    <shortcut>G</shortcut>
    <variants>
        <variant pitch="57">
            <tremolo>r16</tremolo>
        </variant>
    </variants>
</Drum>

Background: I have been working on creating an (unofficial) extension for Musescore for typesetting and playback for pipe band instruments. I have a custom instruments.xml file, a custom soundfont, two helpful plugins, and a set of templates and examples. I will upload the plugins and share a zip of everything in the forum and hopefully figure out how to make it an official extension once I actually get everything working. I have one thing left to solve before I tackle how to share: highland snare drum playback, specifically the closed buzz roll.

Comments

Kate.Dudek

• Jan 10, 2021 - 06:07

As has happened for me before, the embarrassment of having to ask for help has driven me to figure out the issue, or at least a simpler resolution. I had a continuous closed roll sample that I hadn't been able to get to work earlier (it played for too long) and I figured out how to properly shorten the loop end point and anyway it sounds good enough that I won't have to write this plugin afterall.

Sorry if you read all this only to find I've resolved it.