I want to work with all Iranian scales. In Persian music there are 7 main scales called DASTGAAH, each Dastgaah consists of many GOOSHEH’s, that are slightly various. Totally there are more than 45 scales in Persian music. All the 7 main scales contain quarter-tones, which are approximately but not exactly half of a semi-tone.
For example, below is the SHOOR scale:
G | Ak | Bb | C | Dk | Eb | F | G
k means that the note is played a quarter tone lower, so Ak is approx. halfway between A and Ab. This is called a KORON. SORI means a quarter-tone higher.
Of course it is, but you cannot produce electronic music with them! I’ve always searched for an easy way to use Iranian scales in renoise.
All Iranian traditional musical instruments are built in a way that they can produce as many as the notes of the 7 Dastgaah’s. Consider the TAAR for instance:
If you look carefully at the frets on the fingerboard, you see that they do not seem to have a logical order like what you see on a guitar, but this kind of arrangement of frets makes it possible to play almost all Iranian scales by TAAR. None of Iranian instruments strings need to be bent to produce a quarter-tone.
So, if the SHOOR scale was adapted to a Renoise instrument, it would lack the normal A, E and B notes, as well as most “black” keys.
The way I have imagined a tuning to work, the keyboard would be laid out in the following way - only the C note is actually placed in the right spot, the rest are laid out in “order of arrival”:
And perhaps, in a future version of the microtuner, it would be useful to merge the normal keyboard layout (the default western pentatonic scale) with one’s own custom tuning. Then, both tunings would be available in the same instrument.
For a rock band to make music microtonally, I would assume they would need to have custom fretboards on their guitars and basses… otherwise bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, or Mike Patton’s various projects would have almost definitely have done this already (if they haven’t already!)
Let me correct this: if the SHOOR scale is adapted to a renoise instrument, there are 2 quarter-tones that need to be added: Ak and Dk, so you’ll need to use a copy of the sample transposed a quarter-note down (sample 1) like this:
This is how I made instruments in renoise to play Persian scales, so I can easily play them using a MIDI keyboard and based on Iranian music standards. When a real piano is tuned to be played in SHOOR scale it would also be something like this.
EDIT: Other things to be mentioned here are these:
The notes in persian music are totally some cents sharper than classical notes.
Iranian scales can be played starting from different notes. For example there is another common kind of SHOOR scale known as SHOOR in F, starting from F.
The microtonal notes in a scale are not exactly the same. For example the interval between A and Ak in SHOOR scale is not the same as the interval between D and Dk.
In fact emotional/traditional eastern music cannot be formulated completely. It is highly dependant on improvisation and internal creativity.
You’d be surprised. There are not a whole load of rock bands doing anything microtonal, and certainly not many better-known rock musicians. Hardcore/metal bands like harmonic dissonance and often bend notes, but I don’t know of any who have taken it to a more musical level – i.e., beyond just “sounding out of tune” for cool effect. Not here in the West. Even DEP and Patton.
Part of the difficulty – besides discovering, enjoying, and understanding xenharmonic music – lies in the fact that the basis of rock, the guitar, has to be specially changed for it. It’s not cheap either. I have a friend who’s had many guitars (six or seven?) re-fretted by specialists to various tuning systems. But you’d have to be crazy like him: Holocene
Edit: I’d also like to add that MIDI support for retuning is inherently sucky, if not non-existent. With the help of computer software like Scala, and hopefully someday Renoise, it may be a little easier to implement.
When I decided to go for a “in order of arrival” instead of trying to place notes as near as possible to their original key, it is mostly because some scales are really complex, and need more than an octaves worth of keys to fit all the tunings onto a keyboard. Consider the Bohlen-Pierce scale (screenshot from Scala):
There are 25 unique tunings for each “octave”, each octave being approx. 2000 cents, instead of the normal 1200 cents.
I agree. So, when the Taar is able to play most persian scales (although these scales are in fact slightly different from each other), it is because the accomplished taar player will emphasize certain notes in a non-descript way.
Hmmm…Maybe we could ask Taktik to make the pitch bend command support samle-based instruments?
Ah. I get it. After some experimentation, it seems that some VSTis will accept MIDI pitch bend messages, and some don’t. Also, those which do accept it can be bent with the pitch wheel on a MIDI controller.
But this still doesn’t solve the problem of bending samples. Renoise doesn’t have any pitch-bend support for samples?
Not exactly, no. Renoise has lots of ways to achieve the same effect, for instance the 5 command for sliding to a note. But when we’re talking about sliding to a point “between notes”, yeah, it lacks.
Take the 1 and 2 commands (pitch up/down). You tell Renoise to pitch up, and it will do so, but in a relative way (“Increase pitch by this amount”), also depending on other factors such as the speed at which the track is played. Most of the time, one will need to hear the result to determine if it’s OK. In contrast, pitch bending will work with absolute values. “Go to this value!”.
So, it would be great have have both ways of pitching, especially in a microtonal context.
very interesting stuff but… i am really curious how this kind of scale would work in harmony, i can imagine it with some bourdon [one root note played in the background] but what about more complex ones ? are there any books / pdfs about this ?
Until then…If I understand things correctly, the changed timing in Renoise2.0 has some side benefits, such as making microtonal tunings easier to recreate using the pitch command.
Executive summary: the pitch command is no longer affected by the number of ticks/song tempo, like it used to.
How would this work programming in the pitchcommands? How would I calculate the correct offsets/ commandvalues for recreation of a scale? Math n00b here
I, of course, rather have Renoise be able to load in scale files and do this automatically under the hood! But if there is a technique to do this with patterncommands than I’d like to know how!
cheers,
R
[i](for example for the indonesian pelog scale:
! pelog1.scl
!
Gamelan Saih pitu from Ksatria, Den Pasar (South Bali). 1/1=312.5 Hz
7
!
153.000
315.000
552.000
706.000
848.000
1058.000
2/1 ) [/i]
yes, it is undoubtably easier now, but still a nightmare
unless you want to always put a 01xx/02xx on each note you write…
on a side note, even if Renoise imported scl files, you would still need a different sample for each key, so that Renoise can apply the correct tune to each sample in the keyboard. This could be made automatically by Renoise, but makes things more complex to create for taktik…
so this is something which should at least wait for an XRNI redesign in order to be consistently supported
What a coincidence that this topic was revived. I just got into tuning again recently. I’ve been doing some work in Max/MSP, and I’ll post here if I finish any useful tools.
