Friday, June 05, 2009

Nitro Tuning: X-EDX

I was very much intrigued and inspired by nitro2k01's recent post about tuning (specifically, the post was about tuning in a "6-EDF" or six divisions of a fifth). Naturally, I wanted to play around with these ideas as well, so i made a super-simple Max patch that allowed me to easily explore these tunings. You can see it below. The patch allows the user to explore "variable" divisions of a "variable" ratio, hence the name X-EDX.

4 comments:

REI_ said...

ow my brain! so could this work for any console that is hooked up via midi?

nitro2k01 said...

Not easily. MIDI was made for regular semitones. You could try to emulate using the pitch wheel for example, but it wouldn't be good. Retuning instruments like this works better in a modular environment like Max/MSP (which is what little-scale is using) or Reaktor (Which is what I'm using)

Sebastian Tomczak said...

Rei: it depends also on the console you are using - for example, my Sega Mega Drive MIDI Interface using a formula very similar to the one above, apart from the fact that you can't set the ratio (however, this is very easily achieved). In other words, you can set the division of the octave via MIDI CC commands - and it would be very simple to change it so that you can set the ratio as well as the division.

REI_ said...

ah. yeah I need you to go ahead and send me your sega midi setup right away so I can experiment on this =)

so you can use max/msp or reaktor with a gameboy via midi and achieve these semitones? or would you first have to retune the lsdj program like you did a while back and just deal with it that way? I imagine it would be a lil weird since you would be sending it a note of C or C# but that really stands for some semitone value or something.... am I talking out my ass? lol seriously cause' this stuff is way over my head...