Musescore seriously needs a percussion revamp

• Sep 7, 2023 - 00:21

As a percussionist I find it extremely confusing and sometimes downright awful trying to compose for percussion in its current state. For example, is there any clear reason why the percussion instrument has a different instrument mapping than the drumset? It doesn't make much sense imo. But even if it has a different mapping, it would be fine, that is if the drum rack thing could be easily and intuitively changed so you could have the instruments you want at your disposal without much hassle. That isn't the case, and so if you, for example, don't need all the default instruments like the vibraslap and whatnot but need something like agogo bells. What do you do? You go into the menu, find the vibraslap, remove the name, and that deletes it apparently. Alright. So now to add the agogo bells: Wait how am I supposed to know what midi key the agogo bells are? So you go on the internet, find some hidden musescore pdf file with a list, and there are the agogo bells, keys # 67 and 68. At last. But now I want a ride bell sound. List says #53, alright. So you go to the key 53, add the name, and then you go to play it and wait why is it a tom? Well you don't know that the ride bell is 53 on the drumset instrument, but you were doing things in a percussion instrument, and there is no resource that tells you where the ride bell is in the percussion instrument (there is no ride bell on the percussion drum), and so this has left you very confused on what to do. Turns out easiest option is just to separate each instrument and then when you hand in the parts to the percussionists, you just shrug because they have just been handed in like 5 different sheets for something that could've easily been in a single part.

Now that you kind of understand how infuriating it is, here is my suggestion:
When you add a percussion part, a menu appears where you can then choose the instruments from the normal percussion instrument list, and place them where you want in the stave.
This would tremendously benefit everyone, although I haven't thought of how this would affect VST support.

Musescore as notation software should be able to work in any situation, but with the percussion in this state, it's proven difficult to compose in situations like percussion ensembles or simple concert accessory percussion parts.

and i won't talk about the marching percussion plugin from musescore 3, which many are still waiting to come to musescore 4


Comments

See https://musescore.org/en/node/354177
We're delighted to welcome Zac Jansheski to the MuseScore desktop team. Zac has worked at Muse for several years now, but he recently joined the MuseScore team as a Quality Assurance Engineer. If you’ve taken a peek at our GitHub repo lately you’ve probably noticed an increasing raft of concise and carefully crafted issues with his name on them! Luckily for us, Zac is also an expert percussionist, and he’ll be helping with the major percussion overhaul we have planned for later in the 4.x series.

Hopefully it will be less ridiculous.....

I'm not even a percussionist and I couldn't agree more. The whole drum palette idea is a mess. And I'm told that if I would just learn how to use the palette it's faster and better. Maybe, but not for me. After defining the sounds I want (not easy either) I just want to click notes onto the staff. This is only possible for some orchestra type percussion. And then only one voice per staff.
While it is possible to create a part that uses what ever instruments you need, you obviously can't get playback of that part. Making those combined parts might be the way you have to go. Sure it is extra work on your part. But at least you don't have to write it out by hand.

As explained in your other thread, orchestral percussion is different from state standard as it's been in place for decades. I doubt any redesign of drum input will be altering the General MIDI standard. But certainly, the customization dialog can stand improvement, and as mentioned, that is being worked on. I assume the actual input scheme is too - but hopefully the efficiency of the current one won't be compromised..

Not sure what you mean about combing parts - that's actually perfectly doable. if you attach your score, we can help you understand how.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.