This post is somewhat technical. It describes the setup that I plan to use for composing high school drumline sheet music. See here for some back story. The process is further complicated by the fact that I use Linux (Kubuntu) as my primary operating system, which means I had to investigate the world of open source audio software to see what I needed, and make sense of all the jargon. Ultimately, I'm using a combination of Denemo, Lilypond, Swami, and FluidSynth. The common thread between them is MIDI.
It's taken me a week to figure all this stuff out. With the help of some tutorials and well-written articles about some of the details of MIDI and soundfonts, I finally got things working.
First of all, I found a great tutorial on using Swami to create a custom soundfont. What's a soundfont? Imagine a musical keyboard and the way the keys can be assigned to play different notes and sounds. A soundfont contains a collection of these sounds that are mapped to notes/keys. The soundfont I created contains the drumline instruments needed for playback of my compositions. It was created in such a way that I can assign a sheet music staff to the snare instrument, another to a tenor instrument, the third staff to basses and the fourth to cymbals. Each real-world instrument has its counterpart in a MIDI preset.
Denemo is a score editor which I'm using to compose music and print it out as sheet music. Luckily, it can output as a PDF and also as a MIDI file. Within Denemo I assign MIDI presets to the appropriate staffs and save the composition as a MIDI file. I then use fluidsynth to play the MIDI file loaded with my custom drumline soundfont.
This seems a complex setup, and it is, but it's the most efficient setup I can hope for. I didn't want to have to compose a cadence twice: once in my score editor, and a second time in a drum sequencer. It's much easier to compose once in Denemo, export to MIDI, and play through fluidsynth.
Of course, if you come across this article and would like more of the technical details, drop me a line. I'll be happy to help you out.
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