Miscellaneous news

Dear Tuning -

some items of interest:

1) Just published: THE QUARTER-TONE RECORDER MANUAL by Kathryn
Bennetts, Donald Boustead and Peter Bowman. Moeck No 2084, Moeck
Verlag Celle.

I just recieved my copy, and it looks excellent. All examples
are for conventional alto recorder, it includes a separate fingering
chart, numerous 1/4 tone exercises, a short work by Donald Bousted,
and a list of about 30 existing 1/4 tone compositions for
(or including) recorders.

Its about 50 pages altogether - and costs =A35 quid (pounds sterling) -
which is very good value.

2) Heard on the grapevine that Roland will release the S7700 in the
last quarter of 98 - a mega sampler/synth which combines the S7xx
sampler series with the JV1xxx synth - expandable to 128 Mb RAM.
I will certainly contact Roland to discuss its microtonal
capabilities, particularly the ideas of (1) on-board absulute pitch
meter (2) macro setup facilities for non-standard patches (3) the
number of 'partials' (key-groups) etc.

Anyone else interested in knocking on their door with microtonal
ideas?

3) Akai will release the S6000 (?) at about the same time. Latest
sampler, expandable to 256 Mb RAM.

Same question?

4) Lastly, I noticed that the Antares Auto-Tune (rackmount) is on its
way, an updated hardware version of a feature of Pro-Tools. I
haven't seen or heard this thing - but here's the blurb.

*******BEGIN SALES BLURB *********
......enjoy flawless pitch correction in real-time - without
changing the signal in any other way........ Auto tune rack is simple
to operate but extremely powerful in operation. It comes complete
with pre-set scales, incl. major, minor and chromatic (DUUHH!) in any
key. Want to make your own scales? No problem, simply define any
combination of notes as a custom scale......... if you don't want
pitch correction to affect vibrato, slides, bends, etc you can simply
set Auto-Tune to ignore them
*******END SALES BLURB**********

I've no idea whether this thing is any good, or how the custom scales
configuration works, but I can think of a number of applictions in
which this kind of thing might be useful to tuning-ers.