Marimba Red Notes
On the Marimba in bass clef, it says that some of the notes are out of range (red notes). I play percussion and I know for a fact that these notes are possible to play. We have two 5 octave marimbas and they go down to at least "E" below the stave, but on musescore it only lets you play down to "A" inside the stave and the notes sound horrible when they are made red on marimba. Is there anyway that the note range can be changed on the Marimba as it is definitely possible to play down to a low E.
Comments
Is this in MuseScore 1.3?
Instrument definitions have been overhauled for MuseScore 2 when it finally arrives, and I did have advice from a percussionist when I did the marimba definitions.
Perhaps you could check with a nightly build to see if things are OK.
In the meantime you could edit the insturments.xml file in the MuseScore templates folder - getting to this will depend on your OS.
Even without editing that file, you can also override the settings for any given score - just right an empty place in the staff, Staff Properties, and set the range to whatever your particular of marimba supports. That's probably the best solution if you are righting a piece for you to play on your own instrument.
Still, you should consider that the purpose of the feature isn't to tell you what notes *you* can play. It is to let composers know what notes are generally playable. While there do indeed exist marimbas that can play all the way to low C (and below!), not all can. So it is a good idea for MuseScore to warn composers when they are writing notes than many marimba players will not be able to play. But you are free to ignore the warning if you know the person who will play the part will have access to an instrument that can play the notes.
It's a similar issue that comes up for other instruments - eg, some baritone saxophones have a low A while others do not; some tenors have a high F# while others do not. I suppose MuseScore could have separate instrument definitions for the different models of each instrument, so you can choose when creating a score which model you are writing for and get the right ranges automatically. But I think that's overkill, and only one of those could be the default anyhow. It's at least as much work to drill down and find the appropriate alternate instrument definition as to simply change the staff properties.
I guess the question is, if in your experience the 5 octave model of marimba is common enough - and here we should consider, for example, schools as well as professional settings - that it should be considered the default, that would be good information. My limited experience suggests it's not that clear though.