Over time I’ve noticed that I get asked this question more and more:
How do I start writing microtonal music?
This always comes from musicians who have enjoyed listening to microtonal music, and are comfortable composing in their own twelveness, but haven’t found the courage or motivation to start experimenting for themselves.
My answer is always the same.
First you gotta get set up with the right tools for the job. In a few hours or less you can set up some free microtonal synths.
The real thing to do, is get ANY microtonal scale up on your instrument, and then play. It’s fine to choose the scale at random. Keep playing until you find something you like about it. Start building up layers over this. This helps you to find how parts of the scale connect with other parts.
After you become a little comfortable with the scale, just try out a different scale and you may find something even better than before. Then over some days or weeks try another and another. Just experiment.
Your composition skills (or lack thereof) shouldn’t hold you back during this time. This is because when you write microtonally you’ll have to discard a lot of the ‘rules’ you already know. Old habits become unable to reinforce themselves. That’s kinda the point of going to all this effort.
Nobody can guide you through microtonal music the same way that they guide you through playing an instrument or learning music theory. There is no established method, instead you get a bazillion competing schools of thought about how to organise and play from the infinite number of scales that are possible. A well-trodden path simply doesn’t exist for you – you make your own path or you don’t enter this forest at all. But if you do make it inside, you’ll find the sweetest fruits. So it’s totally up to you to start trying.
After going through many creative cycles you get to learn about what scales work for you. If you’re the studious type you may be able to read tuning theory concepts and slowly start to grasps small aspects of it.
For me, it was a lot of listening, and a lot of loading randomly-selected scales into my synth to see what I liked and didn’t. A whole lot of failed experiments, and a few that worked. Reading about microtonal tuning theory is overrated, but it can be a starting point for finding interesting scales. If you have nothing more than a good ear, perhaps it’s you who will excel the most in this unknown territory.
And that’s how to start writing microtonal music. It didn’t take anything more than getting your toes wet with a few randomly-selected microtonal scales.
Hi Sevish
I think on the micro tune – synths you forgot to mention applied acoustics – there “string studio” and “ultra analogue 2” VST/ Standalones allow direct drop of scl. files which is brilliant – i love them and believe they are under rated in the VST world
regards Alex (Varezapiaen Pardrix Ens)
Great shout! I haven’t tried these but it sounds like a dream to drop in a .scl file and play. Cheers!
the xenharmonics wiki linked here doesn’t seem to be operational anymore. :(
The Xenharmonic Wiki has moved here:
https://en.xen.wiki/w/Main_Page
I just haven’t got round to updating all the broken links yet, sorry!
Here’s the list of microtonal software plugins:
https://en.xen.wiki/w/List_of_Microtonal_Software_Plugins
Just wanted to say I love your work! I’m a composer who has been interesting in getting into microtonal music for quite some time and finally am going to invest the proper time into it. Thanks so much for all your great information, as I am going to start reading all of your blogs as well as some books and research different schools of thought. Do you have any suggestions to get started?
Good ideas BUT all of them are static. One tuning out of a scale, one scale at a time, no dynamic change mid-playing? Is this all we can do in 2024? isn’t there anything like open source version of Infinitone DMT or something along those lines? I’ll be honest, I’ve tried most of those VST “microtonal synths” and I don’t like neither them nor the fact that they are STATICALLY retuned and makes me STUCK with a single scale at a time. Surely there must be a better way these days to make every VSTi ever made retunable, every scale tweakable in real time, tunings and scales being made as we play AND all this to be used as user-friendly as possible. Or with as few steps to make it work as possible. Because how else can we retune whole symphonic orchestras’ sample based instruments to something like 53 Ed2 or even more advanced scales? How can we retune “Indian” instruments into actually Indian Carnatic scale instead of this Western abomination of 12TET? It makes little sense to invest time and money into ethnic VST instruments then just break them and make them chromatic-only, no ethnic at all. One such example is African instrument named kora; it has local tunings and scales, but of course, it’s easier to ruin kora with chromatic standard. But what if I want to use kora in my music, not Surge? Because it won’t do despite how much I delight creating the most bizzare scales to the limit of crashing Surge few hundred times. But, why not simply create a free dynamic retuner and stop this whole nonsense which can’t stay like this forever. I case Sevish hadn’t noticed, Subhraag Singh, the author of Infinitone DMT, was supposed to release a new version of it in early spring this year, yet so far guy hadn’t done anything and is unreachable for contact. Worst of all, previous version of Infinitone had a nice 14 day demo, now he removed it from the page and nothing is available at all.
Hello Sevish, thank you so much for your page and all the work you do.
I would like to know if you can help me finding a way to play in a microtonal system similar to minor, using 12 notes per octave,
I’m starting on microtonalism and I really dont get how to set the numbers on the scale workshop. As my main language is spanish, it is a little harder. where do I have to look to find that information?