Brass Features

• Aug 24, 2020 - 19:06

Just some suggestions about Brass sounds:

  1. Horns and Tubas when playing Forte (f,ff,etc) / Sforzando they do not sound realistic: they sound the way the sound when playing piano. Can they have a mechanic that lets them sound differently in such cases? I think it is possible, because piano seems to act like that.

  2. Trumpet mutes are too loud in an orchestra to be considered mutes (I know they aren't exactly mutes), even in front of strings playing ff. I also know I can lower their volume through mixer... eh, consider it if you are bored.

    1. Can we have mute sounds for every brass instrument? (and more types for trumpets/trombones... like straight mutes :P)

    Eek, don't yell if you find the second idea hilarious...

Comments

• Aug 24, 2020 - 22:20

I believe this has to do with how single note dynamics are implemented, piano doesn't support those thus it responds to velocity, whereas wind instruments are the other way around.

General MIDI doesn't define any muted other than trumpet (well, and guitar), so no standard-conforming soundfont will include other brass mutes. But no doubt there exist non-standard ones you can download and install.

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• Aug 24, 2020 - 22:40

Oh ok ,I'm just not happy with anything else and Ch. Collins does a great job in my opinion... (No ok actually there are other nice ones too... My "perfectionism" just doesn't let me have a lot of traffic in my folders)

I'm a bit clueless when it comes to General MIDI... But what do you mean standard? I mean there are other soundfonts which have more stuff... Perhaps only standard ones work for musescore.com uploads? I'll go check wiki again ...

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• Aug 24, 2020 - 22:50

You can use any sound font you want in the program, then use save online from the program and upload the audio file and others will hear the same thing you do.

What General Midi compliant sound fonts do is ALWAYS for level 1 use the first channel for Accoustic Grand piano, channel 41 for violin and so forth. There are additional channels that are not used as well as around 126 other levels for a lot of possible sounds that can be included in the sound font. Many sound fonts, including MuseScore General HQ have additional sounds in the undefined channels. MuseScore will automatically map GM standard sounds to your score and you can use the mixer to manually change this.

There is a more to it than this but these basics should be enough to explain that you can use a soundfont with a straight mute trumpet if you find one you like.

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• Aug 24, 2020 - 23:12

I have seen that there are many... For example violins have fast,slow and tremolo expressive and non I think? I just thought whether other mutes could be available in the default soundfont set... I tried searching for straight and other mutes the last minutes but found only 2-3 soundfonts of which only 1 I barely liked but anyway, it's just a suggestion.

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• Aug 26, 2020 - 18:51

Yes straight mute is for every brass instrument.
By the way I just searched with google and found some: they were all harmon or wahwah... that's why I thought it would be great to add straight and cup mutes at least in the next update... even if there is only 1 channel we could put them manually to one :/
Unless there really exist some decent ones... Is it okay if I ask for links? (I actually did)

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