Changing a Trumpet to Sound Muted

• Jun 26, 2014 - 21:04

When I pressed F10 to open the part list, I noticed that you can change the sound of a trumpet's part to sound muted. Is there a way to have one trumpet part play its normal trumpet sound and then change it to a muted sound while it is playing?


Comments

In reply to by Jm6stringer

Running OS X 10.10.2, MuseScore NB c169cc2

I don't see how this function works as documented. I added staff text to trumpet and trombone parts, changing the text to read "Mute". I followed the instructions in the first attachment below that says to right-click and select Staff Text Properties, then says "mark the channel checkbox". I don't see a "channel checkbox", what I see is the dialog box in the second attachment. Has something changed about the user interface?

Thanks in advance!

In reply to by mjzwick

The existing one is not sooo far of that it wouldn't push you in the right direction, is it?

Your picture shoes the channels, and they are set to "normal". Just select 'mute' there

New is that you can now switch those channels per voice and not only per stave

In reply to by mjzwick

Only trumpets (normal, mute) and strings (normal, pizzicato, tremolo, arco) have options here.
(well, cornets pipe organ and some synthesizers too)

Not sure whether GM has a separate sound for muted trombones, if it has, adding this option to instruments.xml should be easy

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

It's not part of the basic set. The Level 2 spec calls for Trombone 1, Trombone 2, and Bright Trombone, and I imagine at least some soundfonts choose to make Trombone 2 muted. But I doubt you can count on it, and in any case, I suspect many if not most GM soundfonts don't support the full Level 2 range anyhow.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I opened a score that just has muted trumpet and decided to give it a try. I go to staff text properties and change voice 1 to Mute (I also tried changing all voices to mute), click OK and nothing happens: it does not seem to save my selection of Mute instead of normal.

In reply to by mjzwick

As discussed in the issue report, this isn't a bug, it's just a questionable design choice in the dialog. You have to actually press a button to say which voice you want to affect - merely selecting something in the dropdown isn't good enough. I'd love to see a better design, not sure if it's in the cards for 2.0 or not.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

To give you an idea about how confusing it is, after I saw this I pulled up the dialog again and stared it it for the "buttons" you mention until it occurred to me that you meant the four colored voice buttons next to the drop downs. Definitely not intuitive!

But also, I don't get the process. What happens if you select MUTE for voice 1 on the first drop down and normal on the second? What exactly is this odd 4x2 matrix trying to do?

Hopefully the documentation can explain this.

Thanks!

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Then the right way to do it would be to have four drop downs, one for each voice. There is no need to have all four buttons to the left. This eliminates mapping to multiple selections on the same voice or having to create the logic to prevent that in the application. It would be much clearer to the user as well.

Muted trumpet, muted trombone ... Sure, and don't forget muted horn (as in French horn)! And stopped horn!! Surely it can't be that hard to find the freeware synthesized sounds, and to incorporate an easily selectable option that can be applied note-by-note? Please, please!

In reply to by JAaronson

By all means, feel free to search for such sounds, and then you can use them! You can also create your own customized instruments.xml to allow these sounds to be accessed just as they are for trumpet. But note the General MIDI standard does not define any such sounds, which is why the standard soundfonts we supply don't use them and why the instruments.xml file we provided doesn't provide an option to select them.

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