What is a Microtuner and Microtonal Music?

Standard Western Tuning is called 12 Tone Equal Temperement which means that each semitone is exactly 200 cents apart. As an example on acoustic instruments this is rarely the case, for instance the Piano has slight variations at either end of the keys. Equal Temperement is a fairly recent Tuning sytem and there have been many tradition tunings which diifer such as Meantone or Pythagorean. Using a different tuning will produce different Harmonics in chords and can produce sound which is more harmonically pleasing, though can sound slightly out of tune as our brains are so used to Equal Temperement in the West.

In a wider sense, Eastern Music has many radically different tuning system which give that music it's distinct sound, for instance the the Indian Shruti System uses 22 Notes for an octave as opposed to the Western 12. The different tunings that exist are enormous and as a result using these tunings to make music has come to be known as Microtonal music. Experimental music can often use large patches were 40+ notes are used spanning an Octave.

Another aspect is instrument simulation where the tunings of traditional instruments are copied and converted to scala patches; instruments such as Bagpipes, balafons, marimbas, pan pipes, Indian Flutes etc....

What is Scala?

Scala is open source software for creating tuning scale patches, there is an Archive of over 3500 patches available for download on the Scala website and the good news is that Astralis Orgone and Bion can work directly with these patches. The filenames of these patches tends to be quite obscure and so it is recommended that you change the names to something more meaningful when copying them across. Also some consideration has to be given to the Bank System (see below) when copying them across, it is not a good idea to just copy the whole folder across to a single folder! The Astralis Synths come with an installer which will install over 300 wide ranging patches which are already logically organised.

How it works

The main difficulty in using tunings is that  because midi keyboards are based on 12 Tones, many tuning will not easily map to the keyboard in a logical way. The Astralis system gets around that by offering several different methods of mapping the notes which will be discussed further down. Most Microtonal Systems use midi to accomplish the tuning offsets by using the pitch bend fine tune, the trouble with this is that you can no longer use pitch bend. Astralis overcomes this by using pitch detection and therefore using Pitch Bend and Glide is no problem!




The Patch Selector is located at the top of the synth and works in an identical way to the Orgone Sample System. Patches are organised into banks which are simply folders inside the installed Microtonal Patch folder (selected when installing the patches). This path is located inside the text file at C:\HGSounds_Scales_Path.txt if you ever need to change the location, remember to include a backslash at the end!). Once a bank is selected from the top menu, all patches in that bank become available on the second dropdown menu. The Microtuner can be switched on per Synth in the Synth section, and additionally used by Modulation Sequencer 1 for the pitch Sends. It can be good to use the the microtuner on just one synth and select a 12 Tone patch and the slight difference between Equal Temperement and the patch can create a harmonically interesting effect. You can also use a drone patch to have a constant drone in the background for one of the synths, or create wildy chaotic sounds!

• Random Bank Lock - Button on the left when enabled will lock the randomization to the current bank.
• Increment/Decrement - these buttons can be used to scroll through the patches in the current bank. click and hold to autoscroll through them.
• Randomize - Selects a random patch

 

The Microtuner Panel displays extra information about the current patch and provides some advanced settings.

• Name : Shows the filename of the current patch.
• Notes: How many Notes the patch uses.
• Description: Shows any descriptive information contained in the scala file..
• Root Note: Use to transpose the pitch of the root Note.
• HZ Tune: Allows for accurate Hz based tuning useful for emulations (Assuming no other pitch settings are used).
• Stretch: Stretches the Tuning either side of Middle C, useful for stringed instrument natural tuning emulation.
• Column Size: How many patches are displayed in each column of the Popup Menus, also affects the Sample System in Orgone.
• Missing Note Mode - When a patch is not a multiple of 12 and an Octave based mode is used, there are some notes which aren't used in the scale. This setting decides what those notes play:
• Last - Will play the last note and is probably the best setting.
• Root - Will play the root notre of the current octave.

NOTE LAYOUT MODE

This decides how the Notes are mapped to the keyboard:

• Octave Based - This is the best system as each octave always starts on a C so makes it easier to get used to the layout. The sytem uses a template system and lays out the notes to this template based on how many notes are in the scale.
• Straight Based - This just simply maps the notes one after another so on non 12 system scales can be illogical for playing.
• White Notes Octave - Uses only white notes and obeys the Octave rule so that octaves always begin on a C key.  Note that this can lead to unused notes at the end of an octave.
• White Notes Straight - Uses only white notes and places notes one after the other.

NOTES

Astralis currently supports most scala files, it does not currently support patches that uses the offset tuning method, however there are very few files saved in this format. It fully supports the ratio and absolute cents methods or a mixture of the two.

Allthough tuning scales are mostly notes in an Octave, some patches span wider ranges such as an entire Piano Range. In these situations some Octave tuning is neccesary  to bring the keyboard back into range (using the oCtave tuning in the synth section or alternatively the Hz Tuing in this section).