I tried creating a new instrument in the Edit Instruments dialog. But the new instrument doesn’t show up here. Just trying to add a middle eastern drum to a percussion kit.
Hi @Michael_Miller, this is the instrument picker, that you (in this case) activated clicking Add new Instrument (the + icon) inside of your percussion kit. It shows on the left the instrument families, and on the right the instruments available in the selected family.
Percussion kits can only load unpitched percussion instruments, so you see now in your picker only a limited amount of families/instruments, that are compatible with a percussion kit.
Here a visual guide:
Also see (beside the links above):
Choose in the picker the family, that you assigned to your instrument, when creating it.
If it is not here:
be sure that, in the instrument editor, you assigned your newly created instrument to a specific family, otherwise it will not appear in the instrument picker:
Also I noticed that if you create your new instrument selecting for example Percussion Kit (1-line) (that has Number of staves greyed out) and clicking the plus icon (New Instrument From Selection), the newly created instrument will not appear in the picker family or at all.
Make sure you start from an instrument that shows Number of staves: 1, (for example Percussion) before clicking on the plus icon in that dialogue:
Here the workflow:
And the Manual:
Thank you! The video was very helpful in confirming that I was doing the correct steps, but alas, as I follow your video, my “test” instrument doesn’t show up in the Instrument picker. I upgraded earlier this evening to 5.1.60 to be sure it wasn’t a version issue. Any other suggestions? I’m also confused by the fact that the percussion kit is 1 line, yet the instrument shows 5 lines, even though I created the “test” from a 2 line instrument.
What instrument where you using as a starting point, or in other words which instrument was selected, before you clicked on the New Instrument from Selection “+” icon?
Start from an actual instrument and not from a percussion kit!
Try to create it again, selecting for example a snare drum, and then clicking on the New Instrument from Selection “+” icon, changing the Name in instrument picker, then the short and full staff label names.
In your example I see that you have Number of staves: 1 greyed out, (meaning that you used a percussion kit to start with), and this is what I meant to avoid if you need to create just a new instrument first. Sorry if this was not clear enough):
Starting from the Snare drum for example, you will have the “Number of staves: 1” not greyed out…, because the Snare Drum is an instrument, and not a percussion kit:
Here again the steps:
…and it should appear then in the picker, as you are done, so you can add the new instrument to a percussion kit.
You can set all the three possible views (5-line Staff, Grid, Single- line Instruments) in the Edit Percussion Kit dialogue. But which one will be displayed in your layout, depends on your settings in Layout Options/Players/Percussion:
Here the Manual with more detailed explanation:
Thank yo for the detailed reply! I can now see what you meant by “Number of Staves not greyed out”. I was able to create an instrument that looks right. But I can’t change the percussion kit now…? What turns that on? It’s in the Unpitched Percussion family.
ok, I think I’ve got it now. I combined the instrument into a percussion kit and was able to set up the kit the way I need it. Thanks so much for your help.