DONT USE THAT OLD BUGGY THING!! It’s deprecated, as in broken, and has been for some time. But I see the point, for the discussion’s sake. Just wanted to point out that it would only result in headache to try and make it work.
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Participating in the brainstorm
So, my understanding of this is that we basically have two different approaches to this - tuning the instrument as we play it, and preparing tunings in advance (via instrument settings/editor).
For the first part (and I’m no expert in these matters), I’d guess that that when musicians are playing in something like a quarter-note scale, this is often achieved by means of bending the strings, or by other playing techniques that produce a similar result. The point here is, that the instrument isn’t really microtonal to begin with, but because of the way it is being played, the result is.
Now, I find that Renoise is already severely lacking in regard to “realtime pitch modification”, as we don’t have a pitch-bend control for sample-based instruments (VST instruments are fine, as they have the MIDI Control device). But if we were to get such a thing, it would be wonderful if the pitch bend could be configured to “quantize” the pitch slide to a predetermined scale, as defined in the instrument.
But bearing in mind the fact that the otherwise exciting idea of realtime microtonal control of pitch via a quantized pitchbend relies on some existing mechanism for describing the scale, this is most likely not the first thing to be realized - still, I wonder how far a scripted solution could take this idea? Listen to external MIDI, and write pattern commands on the fly…
The other approach is to prepare the instrument in advance. There’s a lot of different approaches, and IMO the one which would interfere the least with any existing workflow, and take the least time from the developers, would be to allow finetune per sample keyzone. In this way, we don’t get the problem of multiple identical samples taking up unnecessary RAM and disk space, and it would be possible to write a script/tool that could take an existing instrument and re-arrange the keyzones when provided with a .scl/.tun file
@Diptera: great to see that your interest in microtonal scales is a lasting one. I have to admit that mine was more of a fleeting moment. Might come back for a second round though