New YouTube orchestral score realized with lmms

• May 3, 2014 - 06:45

I've been absent from the forum for months owing to extra-musical projects. Finally found the time write a new full-orchestra arrangement with Musescore using lmms (Linux MultiMedia Studio) as the instrument sampler. It's called "I'd've Said It Was Love" and here's the link: //youtu.be/LdFzy-OcTDo . Have a listen. It's a great example of what you can do it you take full advantage of Musescore's playback facilities in conjunction with an external sf2 sampler.

lmms is very nearly a killer app. The interface is beautiful and easy to work with, and the ability to add LADSPA effects separately to each sf2 instrument makes it ideal for orchestral scoring. Two of the most useful effects are equalization, which goes a long way to improving the realism of individual instruments, and tweakable "chorus", which is a godsend for passages where, say, the 1st and 2nd flutes are playing in unison. Another plus is normalizing the reverb amongst instruments, which helps overcome the problem of sf2 samples recorded under mismatched acoustic environments.

The downside to lmms is that you can only load sixteen instruments per instance of lmms, which necessitates firing up two instances in order to accommodate a full orchestra. This puts quite a strain on system resources, so a certain amount of system tweaking is needed to achieve optimal performance when playing a Musescore file. I hope to find the time a write a tutorial.

As always, mighty thanks to the Musescore developers for making this kind of project possible.

Comments

• May 3, 2014 - 08:52

Great work Peter :)

It just goes to show that what can be achieved with MuseScore, given the will to push boundaries .

Would you have time to produce some (video) tutorials on this?

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• May 3, 2014 - 21:04

Sounds really good, and great composition too!
I hope you can share your knowledge on how to 'make scores sound good'!
So many times it was stated here in the forums that musescore was only a program for sheetmusic and composing/arranging instead of music creation, but in combination with lmms there are many possibilities.

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• May 3, 2014 - 21:34

Hello and congratulations for this score and his playback.

I love lmms too. What is the soundfont did you use ?

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• May 4, 2014 - 01:11

Soundfonts (plural). :)

Here's the list. All of the .sf2 files can be found at the sf2midi site. The .sf2 file comes first, the specific patch, if any, comes second.

  • Flutes:
    • flute_l.sf2, Soft Flute #1
  • Oboes:
    • FluidR3_GM.sf2, Oboe
  • Clarinets:
    • winds.sf2, Clarinet p
  • Bassoons:
    • sinfonia.sf2, Bassoon
  • French Horns:
    • "French Horn 1.sf2"
  • Trumpets:
    • "brass (solo).sf2", Trumpet 2 p
  • Flugelhorn:
    • JL_Flugelhorn.sf2
  • Trombones:
    • "brass (solo).sf2", Trombone 2 p
  • Strings (all sections):
    • symphonic strings.sf2
  • Cello Pizzicato:
    • strings_dxs_super_pizz.sf2
  • Contrabass Pizzicato:
    • Sonatina Symphony Orchestra, "Strings - Basses Pizzacato.sf2"

The symphonic_strings sf2 was a godsend; legato strings with a properly responsive attack. Took about two years to find it. It's also where lmms really came into its own. I was able to apply equalization to all the string sections separately, guaranteeing that my violas sounded like a viola section, my cellos like cellos, etc. Drastically freed me up to orchestrate as if "for live."

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• May 4, 2014 - 09:36

Sounds great! Am right assuming you rely on JACK to make MuseScore and LMMS communicate? Which other software are involved? Which patchbay, LADSPA plugins, VST? Again assuming you are using Linux, which distribution?

And after asking all these questions, I realized that you already wrote a tutorial here http://musescore.org/en/node/21159. So you do rely on JACK. As you may know, the current development version of MuseScore doesn't have JACK midi out. A Google of Code student will be working on it and I'm mentoring him. See http://musescore.org/en/node/25528 It would be great if you could list the current limitation you encountered when using MuseScore 1.3 with JACK, so we can make it better.

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• May 4, 2014 - 19:30

I haven't encountered any limitations with MS1.3 and JACK. None at all. I click "Use JACK MIDI output", set my number of ports (usually 2), and forget about it. Any annoyances I've come across are the other side of the connection, as it were, e.g. lmms only accepting one port per instance, limiting instruments-per-instance to 16 (LinuxSampler doesn't have this limitation, BTW). MS1.3 is even JACK transport aware, which is a nice convenience. I'm inclined to say that the implementation of JACK midi output in 1.3 should probably just be copied wholus-bolus to 2.0. :) Not too interesting for a GSoC student, though.

Where I do encounter severe handicaps is in the Note Properties dialogue, which, in 1.3, adds a staggering amount of overhead to my workflow, however that is not a JACK-related issue. I've posted about it before, but I don't think it will hurt to reiterate here.

  1. Policy for velocity, ontime, and offtime need to be globally settable (auto, user, percent). It is truly off-putting having to change "auto" to "user" for every single note in a score.
  2. The same parameters must be orthogonal when the dialogue is called on a range of selected notes. If 24 selected notes all have indivdually adjusted velocities, changing the offtime for all of them at once should never wipe out the individual velocity settings.
  3. Tied notes need to respect the offtime of the last note of the tie. In 1.3, they do not, and it's one of the very few instances where I cannot "fool" MS playback into behaving as I wish.
  4. Note properties needs to be more responsive to copy-pasted notes. Pasted notes have to be deselected then reselected before changes in the dialogue have any effect.

I'm hoping these issues are already fixed in 2.0, but if not, they need to be addressed.

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• May 12, 2014 - 09:53

This might be slightly off-topic, but what about Windows users? I know JACK works on Linux and Mac OS X, but if Windows users wanted to use MuseScore to score an audio track, would they be able to do it? Is there some method that I am unaware of?

Just in the spirit of cross-platformness.

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• May 12, 2014 - 10:43

JACK is available for Windows.

There has also been talk of getting MuseScore to transmit and receive OSC messages.

The other possibility would be to provide a VST framework within MuseScore.

The 2nd two options will need further development, however.

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• May 12, 2014 - 16:40

For the kind of work I do, a VST framework would be ideal. It would turn Musescore into the perfect all-in-one arranging/score-writing/performance-generating tool. However, I respect the development team’s “score-writing first, playback second” policy. As long as there’s JACK, Musescore can be connected to VSTs loaded in programs like lmms. No need to duplicate the functionality. “Respect the UNIX philosophy” — tools that do one job, and do it well.

OSC, on the other hand, may eventually supersede MIDI, so it will, in time, become essential for Musescore.

In case anyone’s interested, the complete project for which I made the I'd've Said It Was Love arrangement is on YouTube now at

http://youtu.be/VF7LBxyOwVc

It’s part of a series I call “Lyrics to Songs Without Words”.

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