Changes for MDL percussion

Muse Drumline (MDL2) is a free Muse Sounds library available for MuseScore Studio. It’s the successor to MuseScore Drumline (MDL1), an optional extension for MuseScore 3.

If you open a MuseScore 3 score in MuseScore Studio, a dialog appears informing you about changes to the appearance of your score. Starting in MuseScore Studio 4.4, this dialog now includes a checkbox to enable our new notation and sound mapping for MDL percussion.

This checkbox must be checked in order for marching percussion instruments from MDL1 to sound correct during playback with MS Basic and Muse Sounds. The checkbox has no effect on other instruments besides the ones from MDL1.

Sound mapping

MDL2 and MS Basic use a particular set of MIDI pitches to represent percussion sounds. This means scores created with MDL2 are compatible with MS Basic, and vice versa.

However, MDL1 used a different set of MIDI pitches to represent percussion sounds, so when opening a score that contains notes for MDL1 instruments, it’s necessary to convert these to the MDL2 pitches, otherwise playback would sound wrong (you might hear a rimshot instead of a roll, for example).

Some sounds from MDL1 don’t have an exact match in MDL2. In a few cases, multiple MDL1 pitches are mapped to a single pitch in MDL2. This means some percussion notes that looked and sounded different in MuseScore 3 might now look and sound the same as each other in MuseScore Studio.

Conversion to the new pitch mapping is a one-way process, and it must be done when you first open the score in MuseScore 4. As always, if you’re not ready to fully commit to the new version, we recommend that you save the score as a new file, leaving the original file from MuseScore 3 unmodified.

Notation

In addition to some previously distinct notes now looking the same as each other, the conversion process also applies a new drumset definition to MDL1 percussion instruments. This further alters the notation of these instruments, changing the shapes of some noteheads and making them appear lower or higher on the staff.

Unlike the pitch mapping, which is fixed, the drumset notation changes can be freely altered via the Edit Drumset dialog after the score is loaded.