Blimey Paolo ! :D I was only talking in terms of a thought experiment but you've actually constructed a very good test. Well done and thank you. And it proves my point. Not even Jupiter's lovely new brass ensembles can match up to the stunning, dauntingly forceful, clear, bright, lusty, stentorian, masculine, warlike "yell" of Zodiac's great big burly brass brigade playing at their strongest level.

It's not just big, wide, wet volume, nor the chorus effect of all the instruments in these Zodiac brass ensembles. I believe the Zodiac brass players really laid down something new and unique for VSL in terms of timbral dynamics. And I'm assuming no significant "photoshopping" has been applied to these recordings.

Let's see if I've got my rough analysis, surmises and guesses right regarding your excellent test piece for huge horns, Paolo.

The opening melodic passage is Zodiac, playing the first 4 notes at (or very near) max dynamic; then, much more softly, a melodic variant: G, D, A, G.

Next up is Jupiter, with their dynamic matched to Zodiac's soft handover to them, playing first a comfy G triad with root doubled, then onwards through a short harmonic progression in 4 parts a6. Here, Jupiter's horns sound somewhat congested - which is to be expected for 24 horns playing chords, especially when in equal temperament. (At this softer dynamic level I believe I'd be able to match Jupiter's timbral character by using Dimension horns, but I'd have them playing 4 parts a3 to avoid the congested sound of Jupiter here.)

During Jupiter's harmonic progression there are some short swells, as though looking across nervously at Zodiac and saying "yeah see, we've got you covered". But it's bluff. They can't match the intensity of Zodiac's max force, even though together they outnumber Zodiac's horn brigade 2 to 1.

Then Jupiter hands back to Zodiac after a nice big swell (up to max dynamic? or nearly so) on a big fat open C chord.

Zodiac, unimpressed, states another variant of its opening melody: E, F, E, up to C; this last note resounding with beautiful force at (or close to) max dynamic. Jupiter had done nothing to equal this intense strength of Zodiac.

After that fearsome show of might, Jupiter jumps back in to end the piece with a celebratory fanfare kind of flourish at max power, as if stealing Zodiac's thunder by saying "oh yeah we got the power!" But it's clear who's got the real power - and it ain't Jupiter.

And so, I say my assertions are vindicated in this test and my suggestion for VSL still stands as valid. If another great big orchestra similar to Zodiac is ever recorded, it'll need a bit of divisi to be available - cuz all the other libraries are blown into the weeds by Zodiac-type max force.

What say you, Paolo?

@Macker said:

Let's see if I've got my rough analysis, surmises and guesses right regarding your excellent test piece for huge horns, Paolo.

Macker, perfect analysis (and congratulation for your perfect ear!).

Yes, it seems that Jupiter can't match the power of Zodiac. But it's possibly because I’ve insisted more on its use for choral-like situations. I can't try more instances of Jupiter in unisons to avoid phasing, but maybe I can do a test with a different blend of microphones. I'll try to see what happens by matching note against note as equally as possible.

Paolo

@Macker said:

Here, Jupiter's horns sound somewhat congested - which is to be expected for 24 horns playing chords, especially when in equal temperament.

Macker, sorry if I'm going off-topic, but — I know brass adjust tuning depending on the context (while playing solo or harmony). All considered, brass players are always creating their own tuning at each note.

Which type of tuning would be the legit one, in these chorale-like passages? Going to Just Tuning for this type of passages? Do you have a reference to suggest? I have a lot to learn about brass.

Paolo

That's an extremely good question, Paolo. I'll try to answer as concisely as I can here and now, but if you can wait a while (probably a matter of weeks), I'll have a document prepared that I hope will serve as a primer on orchestral intonation, and I'll post it (free) in this forum.

I already have a few diagrams ready that I'll let you have now in the hope they may help you.

A few points:-

1. As you know, conventional European music theory has for centuries adhered to the Pythagorean Intonation (PI) schema as far as staff notation is concerned. In practice, strings playing double-stops and brass (perhaps woodwind too) playing chords will adjust thirds and sixths to conform to Just Intonation (JI) intervals. But customarily these adjustments are never notated explicitly in the score - conventional staff notation never deviates from pure PI.

As far as we know there never has been any established technique of scoring in JI, which has led some scholars to refute the very idea that JI has ever been used as an intonation schema in its own right. For example, see what these music historians have to say about it in this excellent YT video discourse.

Be that as it may, it doesn't preclude the use of JI intervals here and there where required to sweeten the polyphonic rendition of orchestral instruments. But that stands in fundamental contrast to what several theorists, from Ramos (1482) through to the present day have advocated, i.e. that JI scales ought to be regarded as the basis of an entire intonation schema and should be used for whole pieces of music.

2. Whatever. But the problem here and now is, how do we 'digital emulationists' accurately mimic the playing of actual instrumentalists who make these small but crucial tuning adjustments in their renditions as part and parcel of their normal playing in orchestras? The answer is: with great difficulty, until I release my Situator Environment Subsystem which sits behind the scenes in Logic Pro X doing all the tricky PI and JI stuff for you. But alas, I'm still battling to get the damn thing into its final shape and fit for public release. It's still months away and I - already retired - am not getting any younger.

3. In the meantime, I could perhaps suggest that (if you're into some gruelling arithmetic and tricky technical jiggery-pokery) you could apply MIDI Pitchbend messages to accompany the notes that need these momentary tuning adjustments. (In fact Situator does this for every note - each MIDI Note On triggers a Pitchbend "consort" to accompany the note.) But then you'd still have the problem that all the other notes are still in ET and may or may not be close to the pitch they'd have in PI even without JI adjustments. A bit of a nightmare all round to accomplish on a quick-fix, ad hoc basis, so really, in all good faith, I'd not recommend going down that path.

4. There is a half-way solution already as a standard feature in Logic Pro X, called Hermode tuning. This facility automatically detects when a third or sixth in a chord is present and will adjust the tuning to make those intervals just. It's a clever system but its fundamental flaw is that it uses ET as the basic intonation matrix, so it's sort of a case of 2 steps forward and 1.5 steps backwards.

5. To answer your question more precisely, when brass players encounter in their part, say, a major third of a chord being played by their section, they'll flatten the notated PI pitch by a syntonic comma (about 21.5 cents); thus rendering a beautifully clear and stable just major third within the chord. Or, for a minor third they'll sharpen the notated pitch by a syntonic comma. Overall it's these syntonic comma shifts away from the PI score which do the business and make brass ensembles sound so engagingly clear, positive and sonorous when playing polyphonically. When played in PI only, strictly according to the score, brass chords sound about as rough and unstable as chords played in ET.

6. There is, however, a very useful property of PI (and this is what Situator used for years until recently). To render, say, the chord of C major using only notes within the gamut of the PI schema yet still making a sonorous major third, it can be played as C, Fb, G. This third given by Fb is within about 2 cents of the just third (it's a Pythagorean comma shift, about 23.4c, instead of the required syntonic comma, about 21.5c) and in practice can be extremely difficult to distinguish from exact JI. Therefore if, using .tun microtuning files in VSL VI Pro players, you can provide and organise all the PI notes necessary to play your piece, and then if you also make available those enharmonic PI notes that would closely approximate syntonic comma shifts wherever required, you'd have a reasonably good intonation system. However (as William will probably attest because he's tried it) this is not a straighforward or easy task.

So in conclusion, I wish I could spell out for you a neat and practical method of sweetening your polyphonic brass. But alas, I can't - except to say hang in there, Situator is coming to the rescue .... eventually .... but only if you're ok with using Logic Pro X.

Oh and lastly, I haven't yet found any one reference work that spells out all the necessary facts of actual, practical and theoretical orchestral intonation. Seems to me to be a bit of a dark secret - or perhaps nobody wants to rock the boat in which ET is held to be the one and only narrative worth shoving down everyone's throats.

I've worked it all out for myself.

Macker, absolutely fantastic information! Thank you for being so generous in wanting to share it!

This type of knowledge is usually only transmitted between musicians at workshops or classes. There is very little literature available. Not even easy to find. I could find some fundamental books on Renaissance or Baroque music, for example, only because some friends specialized in this kind of music pointed me toward them.

It would be great if some university press supported your effort to create a systematic publication on the issue of the practice of instrument tuning. It would deserve it, as a sorely missing reference book.

As a workaround with the available tools, I think working on the pitch bend could be another refinement to a score, like the ones we do with attack, release, legato speed. I'm also thinking to some techniques, in Dorico, adding or removing an approximate 21c from a note. If MIDI128 = 2 semitones, MIDI64 = 100c, and 21c = approx. ±12. It could be enough to go near the behavior of a real player.

Paolo

Both Hermode and Situator (the one more automatic, the other more customizable and flexible) would be a great addition to our toolbox. However, our tools can't connect. Logic and Cubase both support Hermode tuning. If I'm not wrong, Cubase pretends that the sound player understands VST2 Detune commands. Dorico does the same with its custom scales (and doesn't support Hermode).

Kontakt and the VSL players do not understand, as far as I can see, VST Detune commands. So, the fact that the sequencer/notation program can send these tuning commands is useless. I think only HALion and NotePerformer can understand these commands.

Supporting custom tuning would not be a matter of responding to a niche request, but simply to make even a simple brass chorale sound better.

Paolo

A very nice article on brass tuning I could find is this one. It contains references to natural tuning tendencies, that can help whoever would be so mad to manually retune a brass sequence:

Ryan Williams - Intonation Guide

This will add some guidance, in addition to your great spiral schemas.

Paolo

Glad to be of service, Paolo.

Sounds like you might make some headway with your manual version of the Hermode tuning technique. Wishing you the best of luck! Let us know how you get on.

As for publishing, I'm not interested in going anywhere near any publishing houses - academic or otherwise. I recall the great days when complex chips and then microprocessers appeared and universities were totally in the dark and taking ages to catch up. Those of us who'd been through the academic mill and were already out in industry as pro design engineers got all the new knowledge from detailed spec sheets and application notes directly from the chip manufacturers. It was a similar situation in digital music production for quite a while, and I'm not about to look to academia for any kind of support in this next and long-overdue stage of the digital music revolution:- Orchestral Intonation (OI). Academia will no doubt catch up in its own good time but right now there's another technical and artistic revolution to be waged.

Bear in mind, only sweetening brass polyphony, though a nice refinement, is a drop in the ocean next to the benefits of going full-on OI in digital composing. I'm thinking that conductors these days are inclined to brush off or simply ignore digital mockups sent by hopeful concert composers, simply because of the dismal lack of vibrant musicality in today's ET-centric compositions. Composers have become far too accustomed to the tiny sand box that ET provides. It's time to open the garden gate, venture out into the big wide world and get into some full-blooded musical adventures with OI.

And with that, I'd better get back to putting Situater into shape. Good hunting, Paolo!

Macker, VERY useful again! Thank you very much!

Paolo

Just a quickie, Paolo.

It seems you're now discovering for yourself the first big problem I encountered in 2001 when I first got busy with OI. MIDI Fine Tuning - or Detune - is not very well pinned down in the MIDI Specification. Many virtual instruments - and the hardware synths and samplers of yesteryear - have gone their own idiosyncratic ways in implementing and calibrating MIDI Fine Tuning; and some, not at all. Trying to use MIDI Fine Tuning, as you've noticed, is a waste of time in Kontakt, for example. It soon became painfully obvious to me it was not the path to take.

Also, .tun microtuning files have the show-stopping disadvantage of being subject to slow-boat-to-China loading speed in operating systems; it's definitely not a real-time facility - although (if I recall correctly) Kontakt does offer the possibility of pre-loading a small array of microtuning files ready for real-time selection.

I came to realise that 14 bit Pitchbend, being much more tightly defined in the MIDI Spec, is the most reliably convenient and accurate way of fine tuning the vast majority of virtual instruments. However, it's still not universally available; I know that some Spitfire libraries, for example, tend to block external Pitchbend input.

As for the recent additions to the MIDI Spec on microtuning, I find them way too heavy-handed and not particularly useful.

Anyway, hope you keep us posted on your battles to solve this primary big problem.

One more thing .... lol, sorry :D

Hermode tuning has been available in LPX for many years now, first appearing in Logic 9. I have to say, in all that time, it hasn't exactly set the world on fire. 

Catch you later, ciao Paolo.

Macker, I know, the alternative tuning issue has been only tried in the VI world. Not much development, however. We musicians are the main culpable: just think to libraries like UVI World Suite, were you can't even use the original cultures tuning with the base player. And, if I'm not wrong, with VSL's players, even with their fantastic historic instruments, you can choose an alternative scale, but you can't tune down to 415 Hz or up to 466 Hz, as required by the historically informed practice.

Yet, microtuning would not only be something for us spectral aficionados, but also to increase realism of any instrument. Why we musicians are not asking for this in higher numbers and more aloud?

In the meantime, I've used the alternative tuning schemas and spirals to try my own Hermode-like tuning of brass. I left leading melodies in Equal Tuning, and adjusted thirds and sixths in harmonies. The result sounds to me a bit strange, I must admit.

JupiZodiFanfare (Just Intonation)

Paolo

Excellent Paolo! Clear, clean, calm polyphony now. Very well done!

I guess your ear has been accustomed to ET for a long time; the strangeness will soon pass. Also, here in this small test piece, thankfully, the ET notes don't venture far away from PI, so hardly a worry on that front.

Success!

Now I'll wait for your next stage of dissatifaction - when you modulate away from the cosy safety of PI-ET similarity. The territory lying ahead of you is vast and will be, until you're fully equipped for OI, unforgiving. But I have faith - you'll rise to the challenge.