Scala, Tunings, Sequencer

[Bobro Cameron]

Hi all you characters, haven't been here for a long time.

Haven't used MIDI for ages (I work with Csound, analogs and acoustic recording). I'm thinking it's time to get back into it BUT- I don't use equal temperament and often work to a "click" that's speeding up and slowing down.

So what I need is a MIDI sequencer, hosting VSTi would be a great plus, that has a tempo track like Cubase, where you can draw in tempro changes, and most importantly can be tuned to alternate tunings, for example taking .scl tuning files from Scala, like the Csound frontend Blue does.

I'll being downloading dozens of demos but maybe someone can help me here, thanks in advance!

-Bobro

[runagate]

Hello
I hope you'r still around becaue I wrote this little explanation
a while back on routing Fractal Tunesmithy through MidiOx into my
sequencer (in this case FLStudio) because it does realtime scala
retuning using the PB channel.

I'd be happy to answer any questions if you end up getting into using midi
and scala (and hopefully be able to answer them)

- runagate

[Bobro Cameron]

Excellent, thanks! Where can I find your article? Checking out sequencers over the next few days.

[runagate]

Lol woops I didn't paste the url

Here it is:
http://the-auditorium.net/viewtopic.php ... ht=fractal

As I said feel free to ask for elaboration.
I really love tunesmithy, especially for live retuning into scala
microtunings. I even got live audio-to-midi routed through tunesmithy
to use microtonal scales to control VST instruments live last night (finally)

[Bobro Cameron]

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for, I'll try to set it up. My concerts are basically karoake and video right now, it's plenty of work making the music and singing but I really need to get more free live instrument stuff going.

[aMUSEd]

Funny - I was going to suggest Tunesmithy too - on my system I don't even need a midi router (its sort of built in) so i can use stuff like Tunesmithy almost as a plugin and its great (my only criticism is the interface is not very ergonomic - endless windows for everything)

[runagate]

Interesting... what are you using that routing isn't necessary with Tunesmithy,
aMUSED?

I'm coming up blank.

[aMUSEd]

I have a Scope (Creamware) system. You can pretty much route anything to anything without needing third party routers or emulated drivers etc. This means if I want to use a standalone device like Tunesmithy or Sounder to run my VSTi's or a Scope synth or even hardware I can just load and play

[sdv]

I have a Scope (Creamware) system. You can pretty much route anything to anything without needing third party routers or emulated drivers etc.

Bichin'

[runagate]

I'm going to have to look into that.
I've seen the word Creamware but never heard what exactly it is.

[aMUSEd]

Creamware cards are often compared to other DSP cards like Powercore or UAD but the concept is very different. Basically the DSP powers a completely modular music production system (almost an OS in itself) that includes synths (including analog, digital and modular instruments), samplers, effects and sound recorders but also has all sorts of neat devices for routing, splitting, merging and manipulating (such as arpeggiators) midi. Although you can run them in a similar way to the other DSP cards and use most (though not all) of the synths and effects as VST's inside an asio host that is really going about it back to front and you lose much of the power and flexibility the system offers. The best way to work is to run everything inside the Scope system which then enables you to work pretty much latency free and you can just use any midi, asio, wave or hardware devices on top of the system almost as if they were the plugins and route sound and midi from one to the other. Its a bit like having eXT or the Logic environment but at the level of the hardware and OS itself.

[runagate]

I was thinking it sounds like hardware eXT while I was reading that.
Pretty sweet, though I generally have no use for most of the effects
that would come on that kind of system. I need crashless fsu live animation
ability! Forgive that aside, but it sure would be sweet to have Tunesmithy
work that way.

Though I don't think I get how you'd use it's multitimbral nature to
route to several instances of the same plugin the way you have to in
FLStudio.

[Bobro Cameron]

Aha- using MIDI yoke I can put Scala into the virtual chain, retuning via pitchbend. Thanks again, runagate.

And- I see now at the Scala site that a number of sofsynths accept tunings from Scala, great! This is all going to be much easier and more filled with opportunities than I thought.

Things are kind of crazy at the moment but I'll be back with some questions- live audio-midi sounds great, as I do perform synths by recording singing, whistling, and playing clarinet then using pitch and envelope followers, and/or vocoding, in Csound. Any tuning is easy to sing or whistle with appropriate cues and drones in the headphones, but I'd like to use more or less ET instruments like the guitar as well.

take care

[runagate]

You must promise to come back and post some of this music!
The "tuning in the headphones" reminds me of Reich's microtonal
Einstein opera.

[Bobro Cameron]

Well, finally got some time to work on this and it sounds like I've got both the loopback and MDI-file retuning features going with Scala, whoo-hoo! Now I just need to find the way to set my Gis-416 base note as default in the keyboard mapping section as well as in the scale section, and things will be just great.

Hopefully the piece I'm working on, with free VSTis found here, will be done by concert time next Friday and I can fly it your way runagate! Back to work...

-Cameron Bobro