Hey microtonal gang, I’m finally ready to announce the release of Horixens, a new album of electronic grooves using microtonal scales. Hear it at Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple / Deezer
Download the liner notes
Cover artwork by Martín Calderón
Hear the ‘Horixens’ album preview on Soundcloud or YouTube
Releases on July 26th for digital download and streaming
In the meantime I just added some previous releases MK-SUPERDUPER, Sean but not Heard, and Human Astronomy to streaming services like Spotify, Apple etc.
Hey microtonal gang. If you want to convert an AnaMark tun file to Scala scl (or other tuning format), here’s how you can do it using the Scale Workshop online microtuner.
Go to https://sevish.com/scaleworkshop
Click New > Import .tun
Select any .tun file from your computer.
Click Export > Download Scala scale (.scl)
Save the .scl file to your computer. Finish.
The above method also works in reverse – you can convert a .scl scale file to a .tun file.
The Export menu gives a few other options, such as Kontakt tuning script, Max/MSP coll frequency list, or PureData text frequency list.
Scala .scl files do not preserve the base MIDI note nor base frequency. If you find that your converted .scl file isn’t in the same key as your original .tun file, then make sure you also export the Scala Mapping (.kbm) file. A .scl and .kbm used together should be in the same key as the original .tun file you imported into Scale Workshop. A .scl file used alone will assume note 1/1 is on MIDI note 60 (middle C) at 261.63 Hz. When you export a .tun file, it already contains the base MIDI note and frequency within it, so there’s no need to export a .kbm alongside the .tun.
Are your exported files not working as expected? Windows and macOS/Linux files work slightly differently. Click General settings and make sure your correct OS is chosen under Line endings format.
Read the Scale Workshop User Guide if you want to learn how to use this software to make microtonal scales.
A new web app called Scale Workshop allows you to design and play your own microtonal scales. You can also tune various other synthesizers with it. It has just reached version 1.0 and is now recommended for use by the wider musician community.
Scale Workshop has these aims in mind:
Scale Workshop puts a polyphonic synth right inside your browser. You can audition and perform your scales by playing with a connected MIDI controller, QWERTY keyboard, or by using the touch-screen overlay.
Convert scl files and convert tun files to various tuning formats. Export formats include Scala .scl/.kbm, AnaMark TUN, Native Instruments Kontakt tuning script, Max/MSP coll text format and Pure Data text format.
Share your scales with other people by copy-and-pasting the URL in your address bar while working on your scale. The recipient will instantly see your scale information and can play it using their keyboard. This is invaluable for communicating your tuning ideas with others, or allowing your musical collaborators to export your tuning in whatever format they prefer. Try it out.
Display frequencies, cents and decimal values for your tuning across all 128 MIDI notes.
Note that this list is incomplete.
This has been a labour of love for almost 2 years – I hope that many people will find it useful! If you want to share any work you’ve created with Scale Workshop then I’d love to hear about it.
Now that Scale Workshop is in a stable state, I am going to focus my attention back on composing new music and hosting the Now&Xen microtonal podcast.
Open Scale Workshop in a new window
Hey microtonal gang. Here are two new releases of xenharmonic electronic music that have come out in the last month. I’ll have both of these in rotation as we go into 2019.
Elaine Walker’s space-pop band ZIA had been mostly quiet since their last album Drum’n’Space in 2011. Seems Elaine was very busy writing and publishing her first book as well as being a mom. I guess that’s a good enough excuse! Four-Momentum is an instrumental album inspired by space-time. The album uses various equal tempered scales (16edo, 17edo, 20edo and Bohlen-Pierce scale).
Jacky Ligon’s new record Transition is a mix of ambient and dub that could very well be described as ‘drum and scape’. Various just intonation scales are in play here. The rhythmic layers in Jacky’s music are deep and complex – like scapes all of their own. Same for the microtonal pitch structures which could also be imagined as scapes. Everything about this record is deep.
Transition is also the debut release on ScapesCircle Records. Seems they’re off to a very promising start indeed.
I always wanted to hear a podcast that discusses microtonal music and plays some tunes. Now Stephen Weigel and I have started such a podcast and invite you to listen to the first three episodes of Now&Xen below:
The pilot episode covers some introductory topics and is fairly short. The next episode “1/1” is already recorded and is much longer, going in depth about how to start making microtonal music and what tunings would be good for beginners.
For the third episode we had our first guest, Elaine Walker of ZIA.
Microtonal Adventures Festival
Four concerts, ten lectures, two workshops, and a roundtable discussion exploring music outside the standard western tuning system.
UnTwelve, WWU, and Sound Culture present the Microtonal Adventures Festival, May 18-20 on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham (USA).
I’ll be on the microtonal electronica panel discussion, May 20th 2-3pm (UTC-7). The panel includes Bruce Hamilton, Brendan Byrnes, Igliashon Jones and Sevish (via Skype).
There will be other workshop events and concerts so check it out if you’re in the area.
I’m always keen to see how other musicians are creating microtonal music and the ideas behind their craft. For a few years now I have been building a YouTube playlist of microtonal music tutorials and explanations. As the playlist now has over 140 videos, it’s a good time to share these hours of content with others.
One thing that makes microtonality fascinating is that the newcomers are exploring new tonal structures that even the old masters haven’t heard of. But new or old, when a musician shares their insight in a video, I include it in the above playlist.
The playlist features videos from: Tolgahan Çoğulu, Adam Neely, Dolores Catherino, minutephysics, This Exists, Elaine Walker, Stephen James Taylor and others.
Of all the software synths in the world, very few of them support microtonal scales. If you are a musician using Linux and open source software then your options are even fewer. It’s for that reason that I want to celebrate the news that amsynth 1.8.0 adds support for microtonal tunings!
amsynth is a virtual analog synthesizer that runs as a standalone or VST, LV2 or DSSI plugin. Its sonic characteristic is similar to other popular digital VA instruments – fantastic for leads, basses and stabby chords. It’s light on the DSP and the controls are very easy to understand, so amsynth will rightfully earn a place in my toolkit once I move my music production machine over to Linux.
The easiest way to get amsynth if you’re on a Debian-based distro is to add the KXStudio repositories and then install via apt. Assuming you already have the KXStudio repos on your system, simply run the following command:
sudo apt install amsynth
If you’re unable to use the above, download the source for amsynth 1.8.0 and build it.
Once you have amsynth up and running, microtunings can be loaded by right clicking the interface and selecting a .scl file. In addition, you can load up a .kbm file for custom key mappings.
If you need some Scala tuning files (.scl) to play with, generate some with my Scale Workshop browser tool, or install Scala itself. Scala is extremely powerful, though you need to install it to your PC along with all its dependencies.
Developers, TAKE NOTE of what amsynth developer Nick Dowell has achieved here – .scl and .kbm formats are BOTH supported. .scl files specify the intervals in the scale, and .kbm specify the base tuning of the scale, whether it is A = 440 Hz or something else entirely.
Without supporting both of these formats, a synth could barely be said to support microtonal scales at all. I’m so pleased that amsynth gets this right.
Judging by this page on amsynth’s GitHub, it looks like amsynth may become cross-platform in the future. Should this ever happen, then Windows and Mac users would also have access to this nifty, free and microtonal instrument too. I look forward to this and will follow amsynth’s progress into the future.
Happy to announce that I finally finished a new collection of microtonal electronic music, Harmony Hacker, and you can hear it now:
9 tracks of microtonal bass music, in much the same style of Rhythm and Xen, Golden Hour, MK-SUPERDUPER, Human Astronomy… The download from bandcamp contains PDF liner notes, where I discuss a little about each track and any processes/tunings used.
Spotify/iTunes/YouTube/Soundcloud release forthcoming – for now grab Harmony Hacker from Bandcamp – enjoy the sounds and thanks the support!