I made a "Mallet Percussion" instrument. How do I apply it to the instrument list?

• Jun 20, 2014 - 22:44

I write music for concert band, and I was really annoyed that with pitched percussion, you couldn't switch between instruments, such as switching from Glockenspiel to Vibraphone in the middle of a piece. The only way I could do this was to have a bunch of different staves. I wanted to have one stave with a bunch of channels for switching between pitched percussion instruments. So I made one, and I think it is correct. Here it is:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X9QfeUCznTXRbTHXxFESUQzWyvNe5upl7qy…

Does this look right? I wrote this in a google doc, so how would I go about actually putting this into the instruments.xml so that I can actually select this as an instrument when I make a score? Also are there any important pitched percussion instruments that I'm missing? I decided to put Goblin and Bowed Glass in because they're the closest I could find to something that sounds like a bowed vibraphone.

So, how do I actually make this an instrument that I can actually use?

EDIT: I also added Oboe doubling English Horn and Alto Sax doubling Soprano Sax.

Comments

Marc Sabatella

• Jun 20, 2014 - 23:31

Best thing to do is make a copy of the instruments.xml that comes with MuseScore, add your code (which looks about right to me), and then use Edit / Preferences to tell it to use your copy instead of the default. This should take effect on the next restart of MuseScore.

BTW, 2.0 will have an "instrument change" element you can use to change instrument soudns mid-score without needing that setup. Unfortunately, it won't change transposition - hopefully a future release will add that.