Mountain Dulcimer tab

Something along these lines has been already discussed in this feature request . The topic itself appears to be a duplicate of this very old post .

While I assume nobody has anything against the Mountain Dulcimer, the topic itself seems to have elicited very little response from the community. I have no idea if the Mountain Dulcimer and the Appalachian Dulcimer are the same instrument (or at least related), but I would believe that by coordinating requests and information, there would be better chances to attract interest to a topic which seems to fulfil a rather niche need.

Thanks for your continuous interest in MuseScore and let's see if the situation can be improved.

There are other instruments that do something similar and for a programmer watching out there I would propose adding fret names to the instrument.xml file. For the dulcimer player looking at the definition it might get a little confusing because software fret position 7 would be musician fret 6+ and software position 8 would be player position 7. I would suggest having the definition look something like

(stringdata)
(frets)8(/frets)
(fretdefs)1=2,"1"(/fretdefs) // fret 1 plays 2 half steps above string e.g. String D plays an E
(fretdefs)2=4,"2"(/fretdefs) // fret 2 plays 4 half steps above string etc.
(fretdefs)3=5,"3"(/fretdefs)
(fretdefs)4=7,"4"(/fretdefs)
(fretdefs)5=9,"5"(/fretdefs)
(fretdefs)6=11,"6"(/fretdefs)
(fretdefs)7=12,"6+"(/fretdefs) // string D plays C# diaplays 6+ on tab
(fretdefs)8=13,"7"(/fretdefs)
(string)31(/string) // D (numbers may be wrong)
(string)36(/string) // A
(string)43(/string) // D
(/stringdata)

This is a portion of what the dulcimer definition would look like. It allows diatonic tuning and alternate fret displays which have been asked for on other instruments as well.

If this were put into a liked tab, then if a note were entered on the staff with an illegal value, the tab could display a red X or even the current red 0 shown for illegal tab notes.

i realize this means adding the option of allowing the user to define frets in a new window, so that is a little more work. From a user point of view, if they wanted to change the tuning to D-A-A they could simply replace the D3 with an A2 (or whatever the correct string is). The fret definitions don't changes since the frets positions are offset from the string. If there is no fret defs as with all currently defined instruments, the frets would default to 1/2 steps and fret display would default to fret number. What if the user selects ABC frets instead of 123? The display on this would not change. If it is necessary to add this option, then you could add another field in the fret definition like

(fret)1,"2","E"(/fret)

Someone familiar with diatonic instruments would have to tell us if this is necessary.

The lack of something like this is the basis of the problem that prevents adding diatonic instrument definitions to MuseScore. This could not be implemented in 2.1 if the code could be written bulletproof over night because of the incompatibilities it would introduce.