microtonal.org

OK, I finally had a chance to go out & look at the new Microtonal.org.
It's looking good. In additon to the resources, I like the list of people
and their pages, too...

So, since about everyone else is listed there... I figured I'd put in my 2 cents.

Musician: Rick McGowan
Home Page: Page of the Moment
(http://rm-and-jo.laughingsquid.org/rick-index.html)
Background: Rick is a denizen of Silicon Valley with a variegated
background in music, writing, anthropology, computers. (The latter pays the
bills.) He studied at Univ of Washington & U.C. Berkeley. Semi-amateur
composer of microtonal ballet music (mainly), and some incidental music for
theater productions. See the home page for samples as well as photos,
poetry, prose, and pointers.

Cheers,
Rick

Rick,

First off, this gives me a belated opportunity to say how much I enjoyed the last batch of music you posted. You give hope to a new owner of an old TX-802! Very fun stuff, and I like that there is variety in style and 'instrumentation' in addition to being microtonal.

{you wrote...}
>So, since about everyone else is listed there... I figured I'd put in my 2 >cents.

I left out Julia Roberts, her interest seems to have waned. But you're ensconced now...

>... See the home page for samples as well as photos, poetry, prose, and >pointers.

Ah, pointers. That's when I lost interest in programming in 'C'. :)

Cheers,
Jon

Hi Jon,

Glad you liked the music I posted... and thanks for putting up my blurb.

Ah, the TX802. Yes, I think they're pretty good boxes. I have three of
them now. They're pretty easy to program and tune. (I use MidiQuest 8 these
days, but most of my voices were hand-programmed in the old days.) I've
recently started using Scala for tuning tables, but years ago I laboriously
entered all of the tunings by hand. In the drawback side, the TX802 front
panel UI for everything leaves something to be desired! Also, I find the
voices tend to be a little thin in the upper partials.

I've been thinking of moving toward software synthesis (with Infinity) but
my machine is too slow...

> Ah, pointers. That's when I lost interest in programming in 'C'. :)

Heh... Pointers are the nemesis of many a budding programmer...

Rick

Hey Jacky --

> Rick - I'm also hugely interested in Infinity - but - and BIG BUT -
> can we affrim that this thing can allow one to design synths which
> have full retuning capabilites???

Yes, I asked them and early on suggested they add it, which they did, but
not in the very first release. The most recent "service pack" for Infinity
2.0 is supposed to have full keyboard retuning. Apparently you can give it
a list of note numbers & frequencies, I believe from a file. However, I
have not tried this out. I have Infinity 2.0 here, in a box, awaiting a new
machine... (The package arrived here at a very inopportune time in my
life, and I have never gotten around to installing it...)

Rick