Change instrument sound in Musescore 4

• Dec 18, 2022 - 05:17

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

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 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.

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 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

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