Blending two instrument sounds into one instrument

• Aug 14, 2015 - 21:37

What I want to do is create a sound somewhere between the church organ sound and the reed organ sound from the standard sound font file (most modern organs have a tonal quality that is somewhere in the middle of these 2 sounds).

What I hoped to do was create an instrument that, similar to the violins (which are comprised of 3 sounds, the main, the pizzacato, and the tremelo patches), has these 2 sounds individually mixable as desired within the mixer window.

After looking at the instrument.xml it appeared that I could do this by adding a new instrument that looks as follows:

            <Instrument id="organ2">
                  <longName>Organ2</longName>
                  <shortName>Org2.</shortName>
                  <description>Electronic Organ plus reed</description>
                  <musicXMLid>keyboard.organ</musicXMLid>
                  <staves>3</staves>
                  <clef>G</clef>
                  <bracket>1</bracket>
                  <bracketSpan>2</bracketSpan>
                  <barlineSpan>2</barlineSpan>
                  <clef staff="2">F</clef>
                  <clef staff="3">F</clef>
                  <barlineSpan staff="3">1</barlineSpan>
                  <Channel>
                        <program value="19"/>
                  </Channel>
                  <Channel name="reed">
                        <program value="20"/>
                  </Channel>
                  <genre>common</genre>
                  <genre>jazz</genre>
                  <genre>orchestra</genre>
            </Instrument>

All I changed were the values in the first 4 properties (id,names, descriptions), and added a channel named "reed", pointing to program value 20 which is the value for the reed organ sound.

Indeed, this does create "Organ2" this within the selectable instruments, and within the mixer Organ2 now provides two separately mixable instruments, one set to the "Church Organ" sound and the other set to the "Reed Organ". Unfortunately, the "Reed Organ" is non-functional ... is not making any noise.

Any suggestions?


Comments

Note if you're going to reply with code similar to mine, you have to surround it by the <pre> </pre> tags, then replace all the less-than signs (<) with the letters "& l t ;" (but with no spaces).

ie. - The <code> tag doesn't seem to be working.

I think you might be misunderstanding the purpose of these channels. They are for *switching* between (using Staff Text), not combining. There is no way to combine channels. And you don't even need to go to all that trouble just to switch between sounds - you can use Instrument text to achieve essentially the same effect without needing to customize the instruments.xml file ahead of time.

See the Handbook under "Change and adjust sounds" and "Mid-staff instrument change" for more information.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Okay, thanks, clearly I misunderstood that. Sorry to be dense, but you're saying musescore doesn't have the capability of assigning 2 channels to one set of notes, eh? If so, that is a serious bummer. Without that capability it seems to me that musescore can't really be a serious midi sequencing tool. But it is awesome for transcribing.

In reply to by davea0511

Be advised that you can add/change soundfonts within MuseScore. (So, you can search for, and then add, a better sounding organ.)
See:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfont-0#install

Also, you can layer church organ and reed organ by creating a separate staff for each organ. Then use the mixer to adjust the relative volume of the two sounds.
Afterwards, if necessary, you can make one of the redundant staves invisible .

Regards.

In reply to by davea0511

The best way to get what you want, is through a new soundfont file wich has the sound you want to get.

Sorry, I don't know where could be one (but, there should be more than one... somewhere).

I'm still looking for the old (before 1970 decade) real Hammond Electric Organ sound. Some day I'll get it.

Juan

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