Unison Marching Bass Drum Notes (also, how to get sextets?)

• Jan 25, 2018 - 01:00

This is a fairly simple one, but one nonetheless I would definitely appreciate having and so would others I've seen on the site.

Some background, I've had the program for about 2 years and I'm a high school student who practices music theory and arranges for my marching/concert and jazz bands in school, and I love this program because of the massive amount of things you can do with it. And I have managed to stumble across a certain feature I believe would greatly improve my speed and efficiency of drumline arranging.

As of now, on the Marching Bass Drum staff (I'm on version 2.0.3), the only way to make all 4/5 basses play at the same time is to manually input them all to play at once. For example, say I have 4 bass players, I'm in 4/4 time and I want them to all play a quarter note on beats 2 and 4, but I only want the biggest bass to play on beats one and three, along with also playing 2 and 4 with all the others. Ideally there would be an option to have a Slash (same head shape on the two low drums on the Quints to play the shells) notehead appear on the middle line of the staff to signal to the basses to play all at once. I have gone into the drumset editor and added a notehead on C-2 and called it "Unison" and gave it the Slash notehead on put it on the middle line, this has drawbacks for playback, most obviously with the lack of a sound for when the note is played. If anyone has a method to have not even all the bass drum sounds play during the note, just the biggest note playing would be fine, anything more than just seeing it. Also, say I wanted to add an extra bass note just under the staff for a 6th bass, similar to the above situation, how would I add the already existing bass sound to that note?

The main idea of all of this is that, I believe the marching bass drums should expand to having 6 sounds and then all be located in the spaces, and if someone doesn't like that then move them between the lines and spaces with the "edit Drumset" option, and then a similar thing on Tenor Drums, have a 2nd higher spock on the first ledger line above the staff with it's own sound.

But if anyone has an option for my bass notation problem that would work now that would be much appreciated. Thank you, have a wonderful day.


Comments

I think you are seeing this well. Probably there should be additional unison hit sounds. Problem is that there are no Standards for how this should work - Genwral MIDI doesn't cover it. So someone will need to invent it.

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