Any people with experience of Scala can offer some assistanc

[mungbeans]

Hi

I'm a guitarist and would like to experiment with micro tunings using my midi guitar in conjunction with my DAW/soft synths. So I need to map the standard notes output from my guitar midi controller into custom notes in the soft synth.

I heard that the program Scala can be used to do this and several soft synths can read its .tun files.

However I don't have a strong background in micro tuning and can't understand the various tutorials I've found about Scala. I would like to be able to play a scale composed of the following frequencies: 174, 285, 396,417,528,639,741,852,963 Hz). As a first step I thought I'd use Scala to map these to my guitar starting at the low E and then play around and tinker in necessary. So the mapping would be:

E2 174 Hz
F2 285 Hz
F#2 396 Hz
G2 417 Hz
G#2 528 Hz
A2 639 Hz
A#2 741 Hz
B2 852 Hz
C2 963 Hz
C#2 174 Hz
D2 285 Hz
D#2 396 Hz
E3 417 Hz
etc.

i.e. there are 9 frequencies to map, so if starting at E2 with 174 hz the sequence will repeat starting at C#2 and so on.


I thought if I can enter this mapping into Scala and save it as a .tun then I'd be able to load it into any compatable soft synth (i.e. Albino) and hook up my midi guitar and start playing.

But I just can't figure out how to do this using Scala. Does anybody know how or knows of a really good tutorial I can read to figure out what to do?

Cheers everybody.

[seraph]

Hi mungbeans
welcome to electro-music.com
I do not use Scala but usually microtonal applications do not use Hz to map notes. You generally use cents or frequency ratios and I think Scala expects key mapping on one of those 2 formats.
You could also try asking the same question on one of the microtonal lists at yahoo
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/MakeMicroMusic/ for example

[seraph]

[mungbeans]

Hi

I was going to experiment mapping all notes on the guitar mapping to these 9 tones with no gaps and also starting at every octave and then see which is the easiest to play with, I think I'd prefer the first as I think it'll be easier to play.

Somebody on another forum gave some mapping for some of these as follows

396 Hz = G5 + 17.6 cts
417 Hz = G#5 + 7 cts
528 Hz = C6 + 15.6 cts
639 Hz = D#6 + 46 cts
741 Hz = F#6 + 2.4 cts
852 Hz = G#6 + 44 cts

My problem is in getting this into Scala.

[seraph]

[seraph]

[mungbeans]

Hi yes I know there's some big gaps in there.

Its called the Solfeggio.

[xjscott]

Hi Carlo, that is the correct way to go from frequencies to ratios. In the Scala format however any notes with a decimal point are considered to be in cents and those with a solidus (/) are ratios.

Reducing the frequency ratios and accounting for the implied starting note of 1/1, the pattern in Scala format would be:

95/58
66/29
139/58
88/29
213/58
247/58
142/29
321/58
963/174

In the Scala format, the last note is the Repeat Ratio of the scale, so this will repeat every 8 notes at a ratio of 963/174. If you wanted the repeat to be at some other interval you'd add it at the end.

In LMSO, you can just paste the list of frequencies above (either with or without the commas) into the Scale Pattern field in "Ratio from 1/1" mode, that mode accepts ratios, harmonic numbers or frequencies directly.

That would give this scale (that's a special link that opens the scale directly in LMSO for those that have it).

[mungbeans]

I've been messing around with Scala, it allows the ability to enter Hz directly. But my experiments end up with a wonky virtual keyboard i.e.

If in Scala, you hit the play button, then if you start off by selecting the preset button you get a picture of a regular 12 tone keyboard:



By hotcheese at 2008-11-27


And you can examine the values in the edit page:



By hotcheese at 2008-11-27


If I edit the first few notes so their frequency values are changed a bit (these are just random values for experimenting with Scala):



By hotcheese at 2008-11-27


Then when you go back to the play/keyboard its mutated into something like this:



By hotcheese at 2008-11-27


If the above diagram is supposed to represent Scala's mapping from standard 12 tone keyboard to new scale then if I save something like this as a .tun and then load it into a soft synth and attempt to play via a midi input device its presumably going to be a bit bonkers. However I cannot find any way of editing that mapping.


DOES ANYBODY KNOW HOE TO RECTIFY THE ABOVE?

Although I was also playing around with the preferences pane and found some midi keyboard settings, but can't figure out how to relate the midi part to the scale part.


By hotcheese at 2008-11-27

[AndyHal]

Not quite sure why would you want to repeat the same sequence of frequencies without doubling them at each octave.

Btw if you were a Mac user this would be easier to do with MMM (you'd just have to copy/paste the nine frequencies a number of times in a text file with some specific header info to obtain the mtx keymap).

In this case doing it manually would take longer because your list of frequencies is not actually a "scale" but rather a full tuning repeated multiple times over the MIDI keyrange (a tuning limited to nine tones only)

http://homepage.mac.com/cerullo/.Public/Scale_Building_Tutorial.pdf

Andy

[mungbeans]

Thanks

I don't want to double the frequencies as I am only interested in playing those particular frequeces etc.

What's MMM, I couldn't find anything from google using various search terms.

[seraph]