Proteus Tuning

Adam.B.Silverman@students.Miami.EDU wrote:

> I'm having trouble getting my EMU Proteus to play microtonally:
> I use a Macintosh with Vision, and have sequenced lines, inserting pitch
> bend messages for microtonal alterations. On playback, though, I kkep
> hearing the "bending" between each note. How do I get it to attack each
> pitch without these little glissandi?
> -Adam

The Proteus does have a "user" tuning which may (or may not) be fine
enough for your purposes (which eliminates the use of the pbend
altogether).

You would probably want to use a patch editor (I use Galaxy) rather than
the front panel display (if it's even available there -- I'm not sure)
which would be unbelievably tedious.

Basically, you can tune each interval individually, by simply typing in
the value in cents. If you're working with 1200-cent octaves with 12
division, you can do one octave and the Proteus will duplicate it;
otherwise, you're stuck with doing all of them. Of course, in Vision
it's up to you to keep track of what, say, "D#3" _really_ is (I use MAX,
so they're all just numbers to me).

The disadvantage is that (for what I assume are floating-point limits or
some such -- any ideas out there?) once you type in, say, 98, it
recalculates to, maybe, 97.8682. (as I said, it may not be critical
enough for your purposes.) The recalculation seems to stay within LND,
though, and my poor shell-shocked ears think my stuff sounds ok (tho'
there's a reason I'm doing this stuff with computers instead of string
instruments).

I have a question about the Proteus itself (and the use of samples of
conventional instruments in general) in tunings other than those they
were designed for; aren't the resonating parts of the instruments
designed to "sweeten" partials (by, for example, shaving miniscule
amounts of wood from the inside of the body) which may not be present if
the fundamental has been retuned (or more to the point here, are we
hearing partials we wouldn't be if we were playing a _real_ instrument
in that tuning)? (Sorry if the question seems naive (or incomprehensibly
phrased) -- I just have to wonder how accurate my experience of these
tunings is...)

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