Implement Flexible Parameters for Choreographing Percussion

• Jun 24, 2018 - 14:43

Alfred Blatter's excellent book: 'Instrumentation & Orchestration', includes a hyper-useful section on choreographing percussion instruments.

MuseScore could make it easy-peasy to convert percussion parts organised by instrument, into percussion parts organised by player. Thus a score could be imported (or made) showing percussion instrument names down the side, for the user in MuseScore then to organise these into Percussionist down the side (Perc. I, Perc. II, Perc. III) and drag instrument parts into them block by block, with clef and instrument change being set automatically.

At the MuseScore Handbook here:

https://musescore.org/en/handbook/mid-staff-instrument-changes

…it says:

‘Mid-staff instrument changes are limited to the same type of staff. For example, you cannot change between a percussion staff and a pitched instrument staff or vice versa.’

…by definition, percussion instruments can be unpitched and pitched! (ii) Why shouldn’t a player be able to switch from a shaker to a xylophe mid-score?

The above facility would be very, very cool. :o)


Comments

FWIW, MuseScore 3 will have more flexibility in terms of being able to change staff parameters on the fly. Currently that does not extend to switching between pitched and unpitched, but hoepfully that will be added before release, which although no date has been set is clearly still quite a ways off.

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