Tuning and Temperament and Pianovelle 2500

Greetings,

In a moment of rashness I decided to present a Temperament lecture/recital
and to make use of the Baldwin Pianovelle 2500. I had been informed that
this otherwise fine instrument was easy to program. Are there any out
there who have used this instrument and might be able offer some
suggestions and advice?

As far as I can tell here is how the instrument operates:

Each pitch of the scale can be altered from Equal Temperament by increments
of 1/64, + or -.

There are two factory presets apart from EQ and two Arabian Scales. They
give Meantone and Werkmeister.

Here's the set up for the Meantone:

Pitch Alteration from EQ
C 0
C# -15
D -4
D# +7
E -9
F +2
F# -13
G -2
G# -17
A -7
A# 4
B -11

Any comments?

I intended to demonstrate the following further temperaments:
(# is the Chapter from Jorgensen's book 'Tuning')

41 J.J. Rousseau's Temperament
47 Handel Well Temperament
56 D'Alembert Modified Meantone
58 Equal Beating D'Alembert Well Temperament
70 The Transposed Vallotti Well Temperament
76 The One Half syntonic Comma Temperament by Kirnberger ca 1771
83 William Hawkings Improved Modified Meantone Temperament of 1807

My hope is to use these and I have come up with some figures using Owen
Jorgensen's text.

All suggestions welcome.

All best wishes,

Gordon Rumson

PS Please excuse any typos here!





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>I 've got an instrument with a 25 tone just intonation scale
>... The only way I can get the notes to be remotely
>similar to what's on the keyboard is breaking the scale up into 8
>different pitch tables, then copying the instrument eight times, each
>with a different pitch table chosen.
>Does anyone know of any easier way to realize this?

Uhmmm... Why 8 pitch tables? (Well, maybe that's not important.)

You may be able to use the patch select buttons: Set up four layers of
the same sound (using copy layer command, being sure to copy on parameters
and not data also), but give each a different pitch table, and then in the
Edit:Instrument page, edit the "00", "*0", "0*", and "**" layers.

That will work if you don't have to hit pitches from two different pitch
tables at the same time. If you do, then do you need all 128 notes? If
not, you can do keyboard splits, and use the octave-range of the notes to
select different subset tunings.

>the same sound (using copy layer command, being sure to copy on parameters
^
|
Oops, that should have read: "only"-----+

Oh, by the way, you may also want to use by far the most common approach
to mapping microtones to electronic keyboards, which is simply to map each
of the 25 pitches, in succession to successive pitches on the keyboard,
mismatching octave boundaries on the 7+5 layout of the keyboard with octave
boundaries in the tuning.

I personally find it utterly incomprehensible that anybody could play
such a construction! But the apparent truth of the matter is that far more
microtonal keyboardists seem to do it that way than trying to split the
tuning up into switchable subset scales. People who have done that include
Harry Partch (on his Chromelodeon), Ivor Darreg on his "Detwelvulate!" CD
(and elsewhere), Jonathan Glasier, Easley Blackwood, Bill Sethares
(although he frequently plays from guitar controllers), and Brian McLaren.

I suppose it's worth noting, however, that Easley Blackwood and Harry
Partch translated the music performed that way in equivalent 12TET notation
before performing that music. (By "translated to equivalent 12TET
notation", I mean rewriting the music to show the 12TET notes that
correspond to the same keys, but not the same pitches, as what will produce
the desired microtonal notes.)

One notable figure who - apparently - uses groups of subset modes
instead is Wendy Carlos.