James Wood tunings

Last year, Garry asked me about James Wood Tunings. I don't know
what tunings he used but I read in the booklet of the CD
Spirit Festival with Lamentations & Village Burial with Fire
Mode Records / New York
that he designed and built an instrument : the microxyl.

"The straight microxyls consist of 36 pieces of wooden dowel laid
over a resonating box - the total range of each microxyl is between
a 3/4 tone (150 cents) and a minor third (300 cents). Thus the interval
between the individual keys of each microxyl is between 4 and 8 cents.
The instrument is designed to be stroked, (not struck), and it's
resulting pitch-bending has the potential to be extremely expressive.
The idea behind this instrument was to represent the inner sadness
of the mourners. In contrast, the elliptical microxyl has a very
different, almost cosmic character -it has 45 keys whose individual
pitches from an elliptical curve, the intervals between 2 cents at the
bottom end and a perfect fourth at the top end. This represents the
mourners outward joy over the freeing of the soul into the spirit world"
(James Wood - september 1995)

--franck

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> > The literate I've seen on the Ensoniq MR Rack says it has only one RAM
> > tuning table location. Is this incorrect?
> sorry it took so long to look this up. yes, the ensoniq has only
> one ram location available. the manual doesn't go into great detail
> about how to set the tunings either. doh!

That is (presumably) true, but I think it's worth noting that it's one
of the few mass-market synths that supports the official MIDI tuning
standard, which I believe includes intricate provisions for dynamic
retuning.

Steve Curtin, who was largely responsible for writing the firmware for
that capability but who no longer works for Ensoniq, can give us more
details.

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>> > The literate I've seen on the Ensoniq MR Rack says it has only one RAM
>> > tuning table location.

It's true that there's only one RAM user tuning on the MR, but like Gary
says you can download to that location using MTS dump messages, and change
the RAM table on the fly using the Note Change message. For details on
this you don't need to look at the manual, just get the MTS spec, a copy of
which is on the tuning list FTP site I think. One minor enhancement I
added- if you send note change messages to tuning number 0x7F and the not
number is in the middle C range, that note change is replicated across
octaves, which is good for middle-eastern style tuning. Since there's
only one user-editable tuning sending a dump or note change to any tuning
number only affects the RAM tuning. This info is in the manual somewhere,
but maybe only in the second edition.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Curtin
Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs Innovations
Microelectronics division, Modems & Multimedia
rm. 3C-208, 200 Laurel Ave S
Middletown, NJ 07748-4801 U S A
ph: (908)957-2996 fax: (908)957-6878
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