Change instrument sound in Musescore 4
The new mixer allows you to change the soundfont for the instrument, but unlike in Musescore 3, you can't change the specific sound for the instrument. In Musescore 3, you would choose all the soundfonts you want to be used in the score, then you'd select the specific sound for the instrument, but now in v4, you can only assign an entire soundfont to an instrument if that makes sense. For example, the piano tracks I used to have assigned to various synthesizers and saw waves is now locked to just piano. If there's a way to change this, I still can't find it.
Comments
I second that, ran into the same problem today and this post was the top answer to my search.
It looks like they now have distortion, overdrive, and all that built in now, it would still be nice to have access to individual tones though. Also kinda related, palm mutes lines are glitchy, they like to continue to mute the next note when it shouldn't be, and no matter how you mute, you can no longer achieve a distorted mute tone like with Musescore 3.
The ability to select other patches from Soundfonts directly from the mixer will be restored in a future update.
In the meantime you could resort to a free VST such as Sforzando or Sfizz to load your preferred soundfont patch that way.
In reply to The ability to select other… by jeetee
Yeah, I've been downloading a lot of VSTs, never used them before, though. They can be finicky, too, they like to crash my scores or just not show up at all. When they do work they're nice, though.
In reply to The ability to select other… by jeetee
How long should we expect to wait for this future update?
In reply to How long should we expect to… by Dylan Chope
You should expect to wait for it until it's ready ;-)
I'm not certain it'll be in the very first bugfix releases already, given that there are a few more critical things to address first (crashes etc..). And I would not expect such a first 4.0.1 before the end of January as many of the team will be on holidays over the coming weeks.
In reply to The ability to select other… by jeetee
Oof... well in case number of comments has any weight on priority for things, I'll chime in that this is super important to me as well! Back to version 3 I go!
In reply to The ability to select other… by jeetee
Thank you for letting us know! Selecting different sound banks is essential for organ composition. Without it, organ playback is essentially useless.
What I did was, I used the instrument sound I wanted instead, and then I replaced the names and abbreviations, and adjusted the usable pitch range to match the instruments I was using.
Is there a way to tweak the timbre on an instrument? I’d just like the piano and voice to have a cleaner sound. The piano almost sounds like it has pedal. I’m not doing complicated scores, just one voice and piano at this point. In general, I’m finding 4 easy to learn, but some things seem to be missing or confusing.
In reply to Is there a way to tweak the… by jbkerman
It sounds to me like the samples themselves might be fine, but everything has a fairly strong reverb effect on it that doesn't seem to be able to be turned off?
In reply to It sounds to me like the… by Daniel Gealow
Could be. I’m only using piano and mezzo-soprano (which doesn’t sound great either.)
In reply to Is there a way to tweak the… by jbkerman
I'm assuming this is the same thing I've been having. From V3 I've already had over a dozen soundfonts installed, so if I want a different sound or timbre for an instrument I just select a different soundfont or VST. For now, unless you revert back to V3 it looks like you'll have to download another soundfont if you don't like the way any of the ones you already have sound.
This issue is all over the Musescore Forum and Issue Tracker, for example:
Can't change instrument through mixer/panel? (M4)
https://musescore.org/en/node/337875
MuseScore 4 Soundfonts
https://musescore.org/en/node/338222
How do I change a specific MIDI sound?
https://musescore.org/en/node/338234
Change instrument sound in Musescore 4
https://musescore.org/en/node/338603
Cannot specify a custom Program/Bank in the Mixer
https://musescore.org/en/node/339998
Inability to chose specific sounds from Musescore Basic & SOundfonts
https://musescore.org/en/node/341096
Commenting to add my vote, hopefully it gets fixed soon