My Technological Overhaul Continues

I like the fact that the two software applications at the heart of my work are named "Logic" and "Reason".
Can't go wrong with that team!

But, you might want to look at Reason 3.5 for obtaining tunings. You can create instruments using Reason's sampler modules and change the tuning for each of the keys. Still, the operative paradigm is the piano keyboard, so 12 note/octaves. But, as you suggest, you could create multiple instruments to extend the notes/octave.

Typically, I use Reason to generate the sound material that I import into Logic tracks for mixing, etc.

For a concert in Montreal, I recently had to program a keyboard for a piece by the German microtonal composer Manfred Stahnke where he uses a non-linear mapping of piano microtonal notes in manner similar to what you've done for your piece The Day Revisited.



Do to this I used Logic's remarkably realistic Yahama piano sound in the EXS 24 and got around Logic's microtonal tuning limitations by just mapping the notes in Max and sending each different note which had a different tuning value to a differently tuned instance of the EXS 24 sampler. The only hard part was figuring out how to get Logic not to receive all channels at once for each instances of the EXS 24. However, after I figured that out it worked beautifully and I'm so happy now that I have a template for doing this type of thing in the future.



(hmm, I guess this means I'm one of those four or five people on the planet engrossed in this topic...)

Hi Kyle,

Please note that you can save tunings in LMSO in the script format that Logic uses.
But it's a pity that there's this 12-tone limitation. Some of the instruments that come with Logic are pretty god.

Juhani

I don't like to advertise my own software this way, but I thought it is relevant to this discussion. In my program blue, there is a microtonal piano roll which works with Scala scale definitions. It can handle any number of scale degrees per octave. Some older pictures are here, though the latest looks a little nicer, but more or less works the same. In the example pictures it shows it using a Bohlen-Pierce scale with 13 scale degrees to the tritave. One can load scales with any number of scale degrees per "octave" and it the piano roll will adjust to the number of scale degrees.

The program is not for everyone, but I thought I'd mention it as I am not aware of any other programs which allow a match up between intention of musical writing and what is represented like this(mostly because they have to work with MIDI).

KG replies: Hey, thanks for advertising it. I'll look into it.

Blue is fantastic. It's one of the great pieces of music software out there, on a par with William Schottstaedt's SND or Barry Vercoe's Csound.

"12 out of" is one of the great curses of music. As Ivor Darreg and countless others have pointed out, whenever you get only 12 pitches out of any xenharmonic tuning, you always wind up being forced to compare it subconsciously to conventional 12-equal and 12-out-of usually comes off sounding out of tune, sour, and just plain bad (even in meantone, if you modulate too far into the wrong keys).

"12 out of" does not work and cannot work. Composers need ALL the pitches in a xenharmonic tuning, not just some of them.

The only really solid solution I've found is to abandon efforts to relate sequencer or 12-based notational pitches to the pitches in the microtonal tuning and simply use MIDI notes. It's crufty and it's ugly and it's a kludge, but it works. The tragedy is that MIDI is not a 12-based system! It's inherently tuning-agnostic, since MIDI only cares about which of the 128 notes you play, not what pitch those notes sound. Alas, 12-equal is like the QWERTY keyboard...it's so thoroughly embedded in our culture that it creates a reality distortion field in everyone's thinking and software designers wind up believing the fairy tale that "there are only 12 pitches, after all."

No one should have to restrict themselves to any arbitrary notes to an octave - or even to the use of octaves, for that matter! There are already a good number of available instruments in the VST format (which Logic can host) that do not have such restrictions. IIRC, Kyle, you've got Kontakt, and with that you've not only got freedom, but through multiple scripts you can utilize several different tunings at once (if desired). But this stuff will get sorted out over time, I'm sure...

Orion Pro/Platinum is another sequencer that supports microtuning for its builtin synths. ( http://www.synapse-audio.com/ ) I just figured out it has the same 12 tone limitation, unfortunately. At least it loads scala files.

crufty!
kludge!
i love it!
i'm telling you, man, you need to start a blog. stat!

I recently played with Antares' infamous Auto-Tune pitch-correcting software for the first time recently, the industry standard plug-in used to rein in and precisely conform vocal takes to precise equal temperament in the studio (and increasingly, in live performances).

Between Cher and Daft Punk we've pretty much heard what this plug-in sounds like when pushed to its limit in equal temperament. But I was happily shocked to discover the options in the 'Scale' menu included many non-12-based scales. It's always reassuring to find presets in industry standard software with names like 'Partch', '(Wendy) Carlos Alpha', 'Carlos Beta', 'Harmonic', '19 / 21/ 34 / 53 Tone', 'Slendro', 'Arabic', etc.

Tuning is one of the easiest things in the world for software to navigate, a simple matter of punching the numbers in. The only thing needed is to make it loudly obvious that there's enough customer interest to have these features incorporated.