Edit and create new instruments
Hello, I am a new member and I think this project is excellent. In fact, I am teacher of music and I want to disclose musescore to my students.
But I have a question: I work, as composer, for several native instruments of Galice. I don't see on musescore if there are a
possibility of edit or create new instruments... am I wrong?
For example, my problem is about galician bagpipes, we have many transposing bagpipes: they tranpose all one octave up. This problem can be solved making a sheet music for piccolo or soprano recorder and applying the sound of english horn... but it's only works for bagpipe in C
The problem is when I have bagpipes in B, Bb, Db, D, Eb, E, F.... there are mainly transposing instruments, but most of they make the transposition 8va down. I need make it 8va high.
Sorry for my bad english, I have tried to explain my problem. The question is: There are on musescore a way for edit and create new instruments?
Thanks!
Ernesto Campos
Comments
If you right click a staff, select Staff Properties, and you can change the name and transposition. To change the sound used for playback, use the Mixer window. the soundfont that comes with MuseScore has only the standard General MIDI set of instruments, but if you have a different soundfont that includes samples of the instruments you want, you can install that instead - just see the section on soundfonts in the Handbook. You can also save any score created this way into the templates folder to use as a basis for future scores. You can also create a customed version of the instruments.xml file in that folder to make those instruments available in the instrument list.
The definition of the instruments is stored in instuments.xml resp. the file selected in menu->Edit->Prefecences...->General->Intruments list and can get changed there.
A comfortable way to edit this is in being talked about for the next version of MuseScore, see http://musescore.org/en/developers-handbook/references/musescore-2.0-ro…
The instruments are defined in
instruments.xml
file. You can change which file MuseScore will read on startup in Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Instrument Lists. Click the blue folder and locateinstruments_es.xml
. Restart MuseScore and try to create a new score with the new score wizard. You should see instrument names in spanish, maybe the galician bagpipes will be there.If they are not in, go to the MuseScore installation folder, in the
templates
directory. The full path should be something likeC:\Program Files\MuseScore\templates
. Open the fileinstruments_es.xml
with a text editor such Notepad++ or PsPad (don't use Notepad or Wordpad).This file is an XML file, it contains each instrument category and in each category the list of the instruments. At the bottom, there is
{syntaxhighlighter brush:xml; gutter: false;}
{/syntaxhighlighter}
You could copy paste this for galicians instruments or add more instruments in the woodwind or brass instrument groups. Note that the extended flag if present and set to 1 will make the instrument group invisible except if you click on "Show more" in the new score wizard.
To create a new instrument add the following in one of the
instrument-group
{syntaxhighlighter brush:xml; gutter: false;}
Piccolo
Picc.
1
74-105
74-108
72
1
{/syntaxhighlighter}
Name and short name are self explanatory. They are used in front of the staff and it's the only thing that should be in spanish or gallego.
Clef defines the default clef for the instrument.
0 : G clef
1 : G clef with 8 alta
2 : G clef with 15 alta
3 : G clef with 8 bassa
etc...
aPitchRange
andpPitchRange
are the amator and professional range of the instrument in midi pitchesprogram
is the General MIDI program number that will be used to selec the sound in the soundfont. It's 0 indexed : Acoustic Grand Piano. See General MIDI for the other ones.extended
. Omit it if you want the instrument to appear without Show More selected.This description is not complete. Unpitched percussions are slightly different. Some instruments like violin and trumpet can define several sounds and so several channel and programs. And you can also define some articulations per instrument.
And this post should go into an how to :)
In reply to The instruments are defined by [DELETED] 5
Marc, Jojo, lasconic:
Thanks very much for your replies!! I'll try it now!!
Thanks very much!!! :)
In reply to The instruments are defined by [DELETED] 5
Yes, please make it a Howto! This is a frequently asked question.
In reply to Yes, please make it a Howto! by Jojo-Schmitz
Done : http://musescore.org/en/node/15803