[electronic] harmonicious synth (mp3)

[uncloned]

Ok,

A friend on trax in space sent me a microtonal scale he was working on and I improvised using it. I midi recorded the improvisation, cleaned it up, speed it up, and added z3ta+ synth 4 times to it.

The scale is to parts of the harmonic series a fifth apart.

!e:\Music\harmonicious scale.scl
!
Harmonicious 12-tone scale
12
!
203.91000173
291.51301613
386.31371386
470.78090733
551.3179423647566
628.2743472684155
701.9550008653874
772.6274277296696
905.8650025961624
1049.3629100223864
1145.0355724642502
2/1

http://clones.soonlabel.com/mp3/harmonioussynth.mp3

and as piano for completeness - the microtonal scale is much more apparent.

http://clones.soonlabel.com/mp3/harmoniouspiano.mp3

[Sam_Zen]

nice improvisation.
On the piano it's indeed more apparent. I can't escape the moments of feeling an 'off-key'.
No such moments with the synth one. Maybe the room gets a bit wider due to the amount of distortion.

[uncloned]

Hi Sam, thanks for the listen. I'm not sure how its working because I've been having success with brass and synths that obviously have lots of harmonics which flies in the face of traditional wisdom the harmonics are largely responsible for the dissonce.

[psishock]

another nice experiment uncloned. I'll be honest (as always) i don't have a clue what are those numbers meaning or what is exactly the "microtuning", but if you are using multiple piano samples on the same note and detuning them to different frequencies, i would keep those frequencies closer to the "given" one 'till i have the illusion that i'm playing 1 note and not multiple when hitting 1 key.
But putting that aside, it has an unique sounding this way, and i have a feeling that this heavy detuned (multiple sample at one keypressing) sounding is very much intentional.
It not works (4 me at least) for the pianos and some other instruments (because they meant to have "accurate" sounding), but it works very well on a lot other.

[Sam_Zen]

Would be like the violin section of the orchestra. All violins have been tuned to the same note.
But of course not one of them share exactly the same pitch. This adds to the power when played together.

[psishock]

yes, on violins works the (controlled) detuning effect very well. On pianos, not, at least not on this wide scale. =)

[uncloned]

another nice experiment uncloned. I'll be honest (as always) i don't have a clue what are those numbers meaning or what is exactly the "microtuning", but if you are using multiple piano samples on the same note and detuning them to different frequencies, i would keep those frequencies closer to the "given" one 'till i have the illusion that i'm playing 1 note and not multiple when hitting 1 key..

Hi Psi!

The numbers mean this:

in a scale from middle C to the C an octave above these are the frequencies each note plays. Now normally the C is around 262 Hz, but as you can see Mike started at about 204 hz. Then each set of numbers define each note, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, etc. until 2/1 which is the C an octave above.

Actually, the piano is only one pitch per note, at least as far as what a real piano does - since there is something like 3 strings per note in the acoustic instrument at not exactly the same pitch for the same reason as Sam stated for strings. The same applies to the synth - except, like with a real synthesizer there are some phase differences, detuning for "fatness" and oscillators at an octave above. The two percussive tracks, snare and hihat don't count in this discussion - so its really two synth tracks melodically.

If you are interested

http://clones.soonlabel.com/mp3/spectra20090127.mid

Of course it will not sound the same without the proper scale.

Thanks for the listen !! I enjoy the microtonal stuff because it is fresh to me and a challenge to do something musical with something so uncharted and foreign.

[psishock]

Aha! So its basically setting different frequencies to each note, rather than using the "default" ones.
I was getting the wrong idea then, i thought that it was something like controlled detuning on multiple samples at once.
Microtuning surely sounds interesting to discover and experiment with, this way. Thanks for explaining.

[uncloned]

if you use Open MPT you can use alternate tunings with samples but the keyboard interface or programing is really clunky. I think I posted a horn piece a couple months ago that I wrote in Open MPT.



I've not been able to get it to work with VSTi's though :-(