E-mu samplers & velocity switching dynamic intonation

Somehow I missed John L.'s comment re. the E-mu samplers' microtuning
convention :

> The E-mu and most other samplers allow tuning per keyboard zone, but there
> are a couple of reasons why it is not all that desireable for
> microtonalists:
>
> 1. If you've ever looked at the zone tuning for a sample, it never has
> exact 0 offset tuning from equal temperament. That's because most real
> world samples are never exactly tuned to 12TET and need a few cents
> correction. When you apply the tuning template from one sample set to
> another, the correction factors never match. Therefore, each tuning
> template created from zones needs to be customized. Keep paper and pen
> handy, because you'll need to record the offsets by hand to add to offsets
> from 12TET.

Doesn't seem like a problem. Anyway most people in the 12-tET establishment
(including within the synth companies) have weird ideas about what
is "in tune", so it may not be so bad to be able to have this level of
access.

Tedious, but what the heck. Better than not having ANY microtuning
capability, or being limited to 12-note tunings. What's the point of 12-note
tables ? It's not that radical, you're still very tied to 12-tET, Pretty
much only good for what are different *shades* of 12EDO.

Oh, I was going through some old digests scouring for info on something, and
came across this :

G. Breed :
>> What difference does it make how the samples are tuned? So long as you
>> correct for mistuning, there shouldn't be problem. That is, record a
>> sample as being Eb, 0.32 cents sharp of equal temperament, or whatever.
>> It's really easy to work out the pitch of a sample: count the number of
>> bytes in the loop. Anyway, give us a sampler and we can tune the samples
>> ourselves. And a lot of voices will use square or sawtooth waves which
>> can be tuned accurately. This isn't a good argument for poor tuning
>> precision, even if it is the argument they give.
>>
J. Loffink :
> Wavetable instruments use multisamples to map multiple samples at defined
> pitches across the keyboard. If these multisamples are mistuned relative to
> each other by up to 1 cent, it doesn't matter how accurate your tuning table
> is, you won't be able to retune the multisamples to correct the errors
> unless your tuning table is specific to each multisample. Now samplers
> don't have this problem as they all allow you to fine tune the pitch of each
> multisample. Most wavetable synthesizers lack this ability.

Also : from digest #1438, A D. Finnamore post mentioning what he'd like to
see in a synth's tuning implementation :

> 2) Sample assignment (in the case of sample-based synthesis) by nearest-to-
> sampled-pitch rather than by note number. This is the most sever problem with
> using Proteuses for tunings that don't map 12-tones-per-octave. For example,
> 31-tET on a Proteus causes the lower tones to be pitch-shifted way above their
> sampled pitch, and higher tones to be shifted way below their sampled pitch,
> making most sounds totally unusable for most musical purposes - they just
> sound too bad for anything but getting a rough idea of what the tunings sound
> like.

John, does the K2500 have this capability ? i.e dividing up indibidual MIDI
note no.s into zones & retuning ea.

BTW, prices for Kurzweils are way cheaper in Europe for some reason.
Look here : http://www.musicians-gear.com a Stuttgart based retailer.
And even here : http://www.kurzweil-europe.de/

I just hope they done *fix" it, atleast not until I own one ;-)
--------------------------------------------------------

To get to the 2nd part of the subject line :

The E-mu samplers allow you to velocity switch between different tunings,
simply by tuning ea. layer differently. The ESI's have 2 layers, the E
series has 32.

The velocity switching trick may be the key to achieving dynamic intonation
in performance using MIDI controller instruments. Damn the pitchbends !

Anyone here playing around with this ?

- Drew

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Another option for tuning is to use a softsynth. For example, I use Reality
which enables the user to specifiy up to 3 or 4 midi controller numbers
(user's choice which) to change the fine tuning with 1 cent resolution.
Each controller has the range the controller changes tuning by specifiable
by the user.

Then one just needs something which can calculate the appropriate tuning and
send the MIDI controller value(s) before each note. I use Logic Audio,
whose environments enable one to program just about anything (but it's in a
data flow language). MAX is similar I believe, but I don't have any
experience with it. I don't know CSound, but there's probably C based or
similar programs that can do the real time calculations as well.

Tto me, this approach seems much better than tuning tables for at least some
applications such as flexible tuning. It's easy to have held notes shifting
on the fly while you play. :)) And I like having the pitch bend
controller free to use so one can bend notes while playing in some weird tuning.

Just my 2 cents worth in case anybody's interested.

Jim Savage