Microtonal features for composers - LinksThere are other tuning programs you can use too - each has its own strengths, so you can try them all out and see which you get along with best for your way of working (or use them all...). Windows - Mac - Multi-platform - Tuning tables - History - What to do next WindowsManuel Op de Coul's SCALA (check out his chromatic clavier and the triad player :-)), Fred Nachbaur's Midi Tempering Utilities, Intun, and Graham Breed's Microtonal Software (all freeware). Also - the first beta release of Joe Monzo's ToneScape - currently a free download - especially designed for lattice explorations. MacJeff Scott's L'il Miss' Scale Oven . He has an intimate understanding of scales as a composer, so this must surely be a must-have program for Mac microtonal composers and musicians - wish I could run it on my PC :-). It works with tuning tables. (commercial) Multi-platformSCALA - for Linux, and Mac as well as Windows. On-line web page tuning applet: Java Tuner , which uses Java to generate waveform audio. Mattlab can be used to make waveform audio files. You can use Excel spreadsheets to generate microtonal midi as David Keenan did with his Tumbling Dekany . (both commercial). This site has an Excel midi tool You can also apply pitch bends by hand in your sequencer or music notation software. See How the pitch bend method works Some composers use Csound. For some microtonal mp3s made using C-sound see Prent Roger's mp3.com page. Csound is open source and multi-platform. You make a plain text file describing your instruments and another for the score using op codes. There's a graphical interface available for help with working with CSound called Cecilia . There are versions of it for Mac, Linux, and Windows. If you are using CSound with Windows, you may find the new Tune Smithy features to automatically build your CSound orchestras from individual instruments of interest. See the CSound pages. Tuning tablesAlso quite a few synths and soft synths have tuning tables, usually with a number of preset tunings as well. No attempt made to list them here - it is a wide spread feature. If you want to retune your synth, use SCALA for Windows and L'il Miss' Scale Oven for the Mac. You can use SCALA to update the tuning tables on most synths so I haven't tried to duplicate that functionality in FTS. You can use FTS to update tuning tables on the few synths that support the Midi standard tuning tables (MTS). Some advanced tuning options can't be achieved via use of a single tuning table, such as changing the tuning as you play in various ways. To do things like that in Midi, you need to use the instant pitch bends method, or software that can update the tuning table as you play (FTS can do that, but only with the MTS sysexes). HistoryThe first DOS retuning program may have been Denny Genovese's "MMT" - available from about 1987, with 1991 as the last release, no longer available. Jeff Scott was also early in the field with his Nuscale for Atari using pitch bends (first internet release in 1994, and predates that). What to do nextFreeware / Shareware status: This feature is shareware. You need the Midi Relaying (Midi In) unlock key - or if you want to use the Rhythms and Polyrhythms metronome, or work with the fractal tunes you need the Complete level. To continue reading about Tune Smithy, go on to the Retuning Midi File Player . To find this feature after you download Tune Smithy: The program comes with a Free Test drive with all the features completely unlocked (start the test drive at any time): |
