Instruments that share the same note are suddenly belting
Hi everyone,
This is a playback problem which I'm probably noticing more than most users because I mostly work in choral music.
Whenever two of the voices in my music share a note (which is reasonably common in choral harmony), the note gets twice as loud. This can lead to extremely sudden loud notes in quiet passages. This doesn't affect the actual production of the score but it is extremely irritating when I'm listening to the playback.
I suspect that the problem comes from the mixing, because all choral voices share the same MIDI sound (Choir Aahs Expr. for me). I'm guessing that the music simply sounds like the note is twice as loud because it's being played on two "instruments" at once, which isn't how it would actually sound when being sung. I've resorted to changing my sounds to a string quartet sound set when I'm working in close, quiet harmonies.
I don't know if there's a feature which would fix this problem or if it's baked into the very structure of MuseScore's MIDI playback, so this is more of a venting post rather than a help request or feature suggestion, but if you have any ideas I'd love to hear them.
Comments
You've two possibillities.
1. Write them in one staff as two or more voices.
2. Modify in the inspector those notes by changing the value of the offset from 0 to e.q. -25 for two notes. Find your own value, if more than two voices have the same pitch.
I've marked these notes in red color.
See the attached example.
This can happen if you have everything panned to the center in the mixer. Try spreading the voices across from left to right.
Plus, the default font is not very good for voices.
In reply to This can happen if you have… by bobjp
If spreaded in the mixer, it also sounds a bit weird because the instruments sound seems to swap to the center of the pan settings suddenly when playing the same pitch. And sounds louder anyway.
In reply to If spreaded in the mixer, it… by HildeK
Try this file. I only hear a minor volume change on doubled pitches. Which is to be expected. Actually there is seldom a good reason to double pitches as done in this example.