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Looper's Delight
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At 10:52 PM -0800 1/2/03, S V G wrote: > RZ: This system has both advantages and disadvantages. It assumes that >pitch bends will always start within a semitone of the nominal pitch, >but it's quite common for some players to bend down from a whole tone >or a minor third above. > > SVG: This shouldn't be too big of a difference to matter. It might not make an audible difference in performance, but it might confuse things in a MIDI recording >SVG: This doesn't jive with my understanding of how MIDI works, >one note that gets bent up or down an octave? Wouldn't that sound >weird at the extremes? Seems to work OK in the Cyberbass. I'm not sure if they have a proprietary system in their Cyberbass tone module, in order to switch between multisamples on the basis of pitch bend values. I'll look into it and get back to you. > > RZ: ...has some interesting possibilities for fretless and even >fretted MIDI guitars. For instance, it allows playing with flexible >intonation. Microtonal players (whose pitch discrimination can be >uncanny) would be able to play guitar synth in Just or other >intonations without the synth having microtonal features. Even >though many synths have tuning capabilities, it requires switching >presets in order to change from one to another. With a MIDI pitch >bend based system the intonation would be left entirely to the >player. > > SVG: Again, I'm not sure that I understand what you are referring to >here. Perhaps I didn't explain it clearly. I'm talking about a dynamically "floating" intonation system where the player has complete control over the intonation rather than having to work within a predetermined tuning system. In other words, rather than having a scale that is set up with each step at a fixed frequency, the player could play each note at whatever frequency was contextually appropriate at the moment. This would allow migration through a variety of intonation systems in the course of a performance without having to set up several different tuning presets and switch from one to another. >And the pitch bend accuracy would be to the nearest 1.5625 cents >(100 cents divided by 64) which is close enough for rock 'n' roll >(though some would moan in a most pitiful way). That may be sufficient resolution for melodic playing, but if you want to play pure harmonic intervals and chords without beats its' not good enough. >With the Kurzweil, you set up one octave and all the octaves are >locked into that same tuning. With Emu, you have to set the tuning >for every single note which is more labor intensive yet it offers >much more flexibility A better way to do it might be to allow the option of copying the tuning a range of notes into different octaves. That way you could easily do "intonation splits" where some octaves were in one intonation and other octaves where in another. >Regardless of whether you are using a fretless or a fretted guitar, >you can set a user definable scale on your synth, turn off the >pitchbend, and anything you play on your guitar will ipso facto >sound within that scale that you defined. That's great for fixed-pitch playing, but if you wanted to have a basic tuning PLUS microtonal ornaments you'd be out of luck. > > RZ: BTW - Middle C is "C4" no matter what Yamaha says. > >SVG: I know that MIDI was developed with several musicians on the >consulting panel. What were they thinking? That they could just >ignore the modern acoustic usage? Especially since there seems to >be no overwhelming reason that they couldn't just keep C4 as C4. I became aware of this after I'd been using Performer together with a Yamaha TX816 in 1986. Then I was doing some beta testing for E-mu and they were using C4. I actually flagged that as an error until I did a little research into musical acoustic standards. I actually got David Zicarelli to add a C4 option to the number objects in Max. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com