You have just written your piece of music using Musescore, but when you play it you are not satisfied with the timbre of the instruments. You are not alone. But what if I tell you that you can change how instruments sound in Musescore? You can have a more professional sound without having to export your MIDI to your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to have it.
SoundFonts
To do so, you need to download soundfonts and install them into your Musescore installation files. This is quite easy, but not everybody knows how to do it. I’ll show you the steps you need to follow to start getting this benefit.
Soundfonts are pieces of software that emulate the instrument’s sound. If you have a music keyboard, you may use it. In our case, we need a specific SoundFont that works with Musescore. Don’t panic! You can download it for free. SoundFonts can be samples of real instruments or a synthesizer file. Musescore works with both.
Musescore uses several different extensions for these files. Files with sf2 and sf3 extensions are in MIDI format and were generated by a synthesizer and files with sfz extensions are samples from the real instrument, so it is a bigger file because it brings inside the zip file wave files.
Downloading SoundFonts
Let’s them download some instruments. The first step is to look for it in Google Search. So, write Soundfonts4u in Google or just click on the following link: https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/ . You may find other sites, but this one is enough to start exploring many different instruments. Take your time to explore the demos before downloading the ones you liked more.
Installing
After downloading the file, you will need to move it to the correct folder in Musescore. To locate the correct folder go to Documents in your computer and find the Musescore folder. If you have the latest version you will find a folder named Musescore3. Click and open it. Now you can see several folders: SoundFonts, Extensions, Images, Plugins, Scores, Styles, and Templates. Click on the Soundfonts and move the files to it.
If you have a lot of files and do not want to put them on your computer, but on an external hard disk instead, you can just create a shortcut to this folder and rename it as SoundFont. I did it on my Mac and you can see in the following picture that I have a folder called SoundFont that in fact is a shortcut to a location in my HD.
The following picture shows in detail the files I have downloaded and moved to the SoundFonts folder in Musescore files. That’s all you have to do to install it. If you are using Windows the procedure is exactly the same.
Loading the SoundFonts in Musescore
Now the next step we have to follow to use the SoundFonts is in Musescore. So, open the software. You will see in the opening Windows that it is opening the Soundfonts.
Now, in the main menu, go to view, then go to synthesizer and click on it. You will see the Synthesizer windows with several folders inside it. For the extensions sf2 and sf3 we will use the Fluid folder and for the sfz extensions we will use the Zerbeus folder.
To add one of the downloaded SoundFonts, click on Add. You will see all the downloaded sf2 and sf3. Just choose one and click on it.
In the following example, I loaded the Rhodes pianos from the list.
If I go now to the Mixer ( Go to Main Menu, click in View, and then Mixer), you can see the file shown in the instrument list is the Rhodes. Play your music and feel the difference among all the different timbres.
Working with Samples (sfz files)
Now, let\s do the same with the samples file. Open the synthesizer again, but open the folder Zerbeus instead. You will see a bunch of files that come with Musescore as shown in the following picture. Then click add and load the downloaded ones and you are ready to use it.
In the following example, I downloaded just one file with samples and you can see that inside it there are a lot of wave files. In fact one per note.
