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Scale Workshop is a web app to make musical scales and tunings. It tunes synthesisers to microtonal traditional scales, historical scales and xenharmonic scales. People who are new to custom tunings can learn a lot by loading up some preset scales in Scale Workshop then mashing the qwerty keys to hear what these things sound like!
As of writing, Scale Workshop is developed by Xenharmonic Developers, lead by Lumi Pakkanen. Many others have contributed new features and fixes over the years. The project was originally started by me (Sevish) and in this article I just wanted to share some of my personal thoughts about the early days of the app.
Scale Workshop current version – hosted on Plainsound with the latest features
Scale Workshop 2 – stable SW2 version hosted on sevish.com
Scale Workshop 1 – original old school version is still available here
At Freiburg in south west Germany a few musicians were gathered around a dinner table next to the venue where a concert was about to happen. EUROMicroFest 2017. Michael H Dixon and Donald Bousted were discussing how they were getting things tuned properly on their MacBooks. Of course, Scala came up. Now Scala is perhaps still the most feature-rich scale/tuning software out there. But one thing I noticed is that people had the exact same trouble getting Scala working on a Mac. It got me thinking that it could be possible to recreate some of Scala’s basic functions in a web app that runs on any browser. The idea wasn’t to replace Scala, but to just implement the absolute basics in a convenient web app.
A few realisations hit me in a row.
It seemed like JavaScript could do all the tuning calculations and could even assemble tuning files that would download straight from the app. (Tuning files are one method that software synths can be retuned).
I learned about the Web Audio API and it seemed possible that such a tuning app could let the user play the scale with a built-in synth.
When I became aware of the Linnstrument, I realised a qwerty keyboard could act like a similar thing, i.e. as an isomorphic keyboard for note input. It seemed only needed two parameters would be needed, vertical and horizontal, to get a variety of different isomorphic keyboard mappings.
I realised that scale data could be stored as URL parameters, so that a bookmarked link would bring you right back to the scale you had worked on earlier. I knew that the online tuning scene (the Xenharmonic Alliance Facebook group, Discord server, and Wiki in particular) would use these URLs to quickly share tunings with each other.
If such a project had a permissive software license, I realised that music tech developers could reuse some of the Scale Workshop code to improve the tuning functionality in their own synths. (As far as I know, this did happen at least once).
And by following an open source model, others may want to contribute bug fixes and improvements so that all users of this free app could benefit.
So at this early stage I had a forming image of Scale Workshop in my head, along with an idea of what tech challenges would need to be overcome. Though, it was something completely unrelated to music that actually got my to execute on my plans! I was seeing a lot of jQuery going around at my day job and I wanted to make sure I understood it better, so I decided to start a side project to practice my jQuery and JavaScript in general. I started to build the one thing that I already had in my head, Scale Workshop!
(Of course, jQuery is extremely old hat now and we don’t use it anymore in recent versions).
Getting Scale Workshop working, bit by bit, became my obsession for a while. Every little success and next challenge kept me interested. I remember boarding a bus for a long journey and thinking “by the time I arrive, I want to have the isomorphic keyboard working.” And I barely did, though it was quite broken, I had managed to get the difficult bits done.
Even when my code works, it’s ugly. I don’t go into personal projects with all the logical stuff worked out in advance. I just kinda guess whether things will work or not, then hack things together until they do. In the case of Scale Workshop, this lead to a lot of “sevishcode”, most of which had to be refactored over time!
Eventually some really cool things started happening. Music teachers started using Scale Workshop in the classroom to teach music theory concepts. Tuning heads were generating scales on the bus and pinging them into Discord for later deep dives. And while I’ve now completely stepped away from the project, other developers joined in the effort to build Scale Workshop, which is still under active development.
Big thanks to all the users and developers of this tool. Happy tuning!
Version 1.8.0 of Decent Sampler offers microtuning support via the Tuning menu. You need to supply it with an scl and kbm file, which can be easily generated with Scale Workshop, Scala, or other tuning creation tool.
Surge XT is a software synth plugin. Version 1.2 is now released. This version improves upon its tuning functionality, accessibility and other things. An excerpt from the changelog reads:
Major Feature: Tuning Upgrades
- Surge can act as an OddSound MTS provider (‘master’) allowing the Surge tuning editor to provide tuning to an entire session.
- Remediate yet more edge cases in our internal tuning, including keyboard mapping larger than a scale.
The short explanation is, if you are using synths that support tuning via MTS-ESP, Surge XT can now act as the MTS-ESP master, which means that you specify your tuning within Surge XT and then the other synths will follow the same tuning. This is intended to be more convenient than loading the same tuning data into multiple instances of various synths.
Surge XT is free and available on Linux, Windows and macOS.
With the recent release of Scale Workshop 2, lead developer Lumi Pakkanen has started producing video tutorials to demonstrate what this tuning application can do. Learning some Scale Workshop basics will aid you in your study of musical tunings. The first two videos are below. For the rest, you’ll have to follow Lumi’s youtube channel.
This tutorial demonstrates the on screen keyboards where you can play microtonal scales in your browser.
This tutorial will answer a lot of questions about how you can enter your own scales from numerical values.
Since Bitwig Studio is a pretty good DAW for making microtonal music, you might find yourself working with a musical scale that contains more or less than 12 notes. Particularly if you’re working with a large scale, you will want the piano roll to visually reflect what you’re hearing. You might have thought this was not currently possible in Bitwig Studio but I have found the quick workaround for you. All you need is to watch the tutorial video below and then spend a few minutes setting up your custom piano roll.
The tutorial music is Yeah Groove from my very recent album Morphable, in 26 tone equal temperament.
Scale Workshop has been updated this weekend. Let’s take a look at what this useful microtonal web tool is capable of.
Launch Scale Workshop in a new tab
With a web MIDI compatible browser, you can use Scale Workshop to enable microtonality on your hardware synths and sound modules. This is achieved by 16 channel note output with pitch bend on each channel.
Rotate your scale so that a different interval becomes the new 1/1.
When using the mouse cursor, you can now play the virtual keyboard stylophone style, i.e. click and drag across the keyboard to hit a sequence of notes.
REAPER supports custom piano roll layouts. You can now export a txt file from Scale Workshop to import directly into REAPER.
Export your tuning to Korg Librarian format. This can be imported into the Korg Librarian software so you can write it to your synth.
Scale Workshop now has better handling of large numbers and ratios.
Issues with the synth audio dropout are resolved. Various new waveforms are added. The default waveform is changed to semisine which is more ideal for auditioning tunings than the previous triangle.
As this version is a major milestone for the app, we have made sure to update the documentation to cover all the new features.
Early development work has started for Scale Workshop 2. This involves a complete rewrite from scratch and a new UI. The project will remain on the permissive MIT License so that synth developers can re-use parts of Scale Workshop’s code to add microtonal functionality to their own projects. Scale Workshop 2 is intended to be released when it reaches feature parity with Scale Workshop 1.5. Scale URLs will remain backwards-compatible. Scale Workshop 1.x will receive no new features except for bug fixes.
It’s a bit oldschool, it’s a bit Web 1.0, but I think it could be quite helpful – I’ve started collecting a list of bookmark links! The links are on-topic for Sevish music: tuning practice, tuning theory, fractals, music playlists, etc.
Have a link to suggest? Send me a quick message on my contact form.
The Xenharmonic Wiki is an online knowledge base relating to microtonal music and tuning theory. For a few years a bunch of us from the community have used the Xen Wiki to maintain a list of software plugins that you can use to make microtonal music in the DAW.
This week the list has been updated because of wonderful developments happening in the music technology world that will allow composers to more easily make microtonal music with a wide variety of synths and virtual instruments. That development is the widespread adoption of MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE). Widespread MPE support means that new tuning tools can be developed which systematically manage the tunings of various instruments at the same time. And indeed, such tools are already coming out this year, for example Oddsound MTS-ESP Suite and Infinitone DMT. A new section of the list has been added to catalogue these tools. An additional section about MPE synths in general was also added.
Two new tools have just appeared that will interest people working with microtonal scales and tunings: Leimma and Apotome. These tools were launched as part of CTM Festival 2021 and were created by Khyam Allami and Counterpoint.
Leimma is a browser-based tool for exploring, creating, hearing, and playing microtonal tuning systems.
Apotome is a browser-based generative music environment based on octave-repeating microtonal tuning systems and their subsets (scales/modes).
