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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.
ok just one more pic then I'll leave you in peace.
This is Situater's control panel. All 35 notes within the PI gamut (and one extra) are available, giving each MIDI keyboard note one of 3 enharmonically related PI notes to play. What can be played at any one time, either live by the keyboard or from a MIDI region in the sequencer, can be set manually, remotely or automated and is always displayed by these keyboard note boxes together with the state of the 4 buttons associated with each note box.
To the right of each note box are two buttons: one to shift the displayed PI note up by a syntonic comma, the other to shift down by a syntonic comma.
Above each note box are 2 ET on/off buttons. The smaller one can set only its associated note to ET, for cases when the orchestral instruments and an ET instrument are playing together but at some point orchestral intonation would put the note too far beyond the ET instrument's fixed tuning. The larger ET button is a global ET on/off switch and display, useful for those moments during writing when it's easier to cruise through a passage in ET rather than be distracted or inhibited by difficult intonation issues that could be sorted out later.
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!
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.
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.
Here's a revealing chart in which the discrepancies in pitches between PI and ET can be seen at the bottom. The scales here are all harmonic chromatic with their tonics on the conventional relative minor of each key signature.
But these spot-pitch discrepancies aren't the whole story. Beautiful, nuanced melodic lines and root progressions, especially when including a sprinkling of just intervals, as Wagner liked to do, are all too often mashed into a dreary, insipid bunch of nondescript pitches by ET.
