I sampled and created a brand new battery percussion soundfont!

Hey Musescore community!

Hope all is well. My name is Adam Peter Shinn and I have some exciting news for those of you working with marching battery percussion ensembles. I have sampled and created a beta version of a new marching battery percussion soundfont to replace the one that comes stock in Musescore 2.0!

Check out a demo cadence I just made using it in the comments!

NOTE: until admins approve the direct link, just search "Boom Cat Cadence by Adam Peter Shinn | November 6, 2017" on google

In the video, you will notice that I have added sounds for duts and was even able to get flams to sound like flams and not diddles/hertas.

More on the soundfont in a second, but first, please allow me to introduce myself as I am new here...

Like many of you, I got my start in music through grade school band and was fortunate enough to be captain of my high school's drumline for two years. During that time, I even wrote a couple of cadences that my line would play. Even back then, Finale was expensive, so the only way I could hear my creations was to get my line to play them and from that moment I knew I was hooked!

My budding interest in music production only took me further down that hole; I now regularly produce instrumental music for hip hop, r&b, and pop artists. I also have a lot of experience recording and mixing instruments both in studio and live music venue settings. You may be aware that a lot of these genres work with sample based music and drums. I've been interested in working on my sampling abilities to complement what I can do currently through virtual instruments and synthesis instruments. It seemed like a good time to return to my battery roots and create my first soundfont!

I was interested in specifically developing a battery percussion soundfont in Musescore for a couple reasons...

1. To improve the great work that already exists in Musescore 2.0 (although those bass drums sound more like a wonky 909 drum kit).

2. To affordably get great playback results that can rival what you would get with Sibelius/Finale and a copy of Virtual Drumline (all of which would set someone back at least $800 -- and that's why many of us came here).

I didn't have a productive use for this soundfont because I don't currently teach any lines; I only intended to practice sampling and possibly crank out a few realistic sounding cadences for fun here and there. I knew I had to share this soundfont with the masses who need it for their jobs.

If you're interested in getting this soundfont, I have a couple of notes...

1. It's important to note that this soundfont is NOT Virtual Drumline so please adjust your expectations accordingly. Something like that is worth all the money you would pay for it. I just don't have one on one access to sample a world class line like Santa Clara Vanguard using high quality mics in a great acoustic setting. Those developers went through pain staking effort for the sake of detail (e.g. sampling left and right strokes for tone inconsistencies). But I did take time to find quality isolated samples of different drums with different timbres and to edit them for optimal playback. So while this is an improvement over stock sounds, this wont replace a live DCI battery.

2. As I mentioned earlier, the soundfont is still in beta. I need to add more sounds and tweak the drumset settings in Musescore some more before I'm comfortable releasing version 1.0. I will update this thread when that time comes. For now, this is just a preview of what is to come. I would use samples that others have supplied, but I want this soundfont to be completely original and not a rehash of what others have done.

3. Some of the things you'll see/hear in my demo involve workarounds. For example, I could not find a way to edit the timing properties of the grace note for playback no matter how hard I tried (heads up developers) so I had to sample flams for each appropriate drum, include that in the soundfont, and lay audio from an edited version of the score over the screen recording of the original score you're seeing. I think I will release a video explaining how to use this workaround. However, I may also release a video showing how I made the kit if that would help others in this endeavor. Let me know in the comments below and if there is enough interest, I'll make it happen!

Adam