fluidsynth microtonal alternative tuning

[bluesscream]

The following might be usefull for people who fiddle with different midi tunings and microtonality:
I was frustrated from my efforts with single note pitchbend detuning using multiple channels due to reduced polyphony, unhandily program changing and unintended squeeks by overlapping different detuned notes on a channel.

Here and there I read stray informations about the microtonal potential of fluidsynth and it's Midi Tuning Standard capabilities. It took me some time to get it.

Fluidsynth no longer reacts as wanted when started with Fokker-Huygen's Scala's textfiles on the commandline but can run fitting sysex midi files.
Scala can convert the .scl files into these sysex midi files and export them in one go.
They can be run with fluidsynth at startup and fluidsynth after this is tuned in the new way.
Even easier is a trick Rui Nuno Capela passed on:
These sysex .mid files can be dragged-and-dropped into the qsynth gui. The fluidsynth instance which is just in the active focus now will be in the new tuning and this can be done with all open fluidsynth instances, one after the other.
Have fun detuning sf2!

[StudioDave]

Neat tips, thanks for posting them.

Best,

dp

[DepreTux]

I'm resurrecting this old thread since it's one of the few startpage results on the subject:

Does the methods described still work for anyone on current kxstudio builds?

I'm on debian wheezy with the kxstudio repos, and I tried exporting midi tuning standard files from scala (which work with the one-sf2 microtonal sampler) and drag'n'dropping them over to the interface of qsynth doesn't affect the tunning.

The only way I'm able to modify fluidsynth's tunning is by exporting the scale as a fluidsynth command file from scala and then running fluidsynth with the "-f" flag, but that's not really convenient.

Thanks for any tips!

[Kel]

I can't find a simple solution for this three years later.

ZynAddSubFX, WhySynth and some other synth plugins have the ability to change from 440 hz built in. Would be nice for an easy to use method to do the same with FluidSynth as well as LinuxSampler. Anyone know of a plugin that works well for this?

[jean-emmanuel]

Just in case someone is still having trouble with this, I wrote a little tool to do just that (generates the appropriate midi tuning message, connects to one or multiple port and sends it). It works fine with fluidsynth : https://github.com/jean-emmanuel/synthtuner

[salmawisoky]

Thank you for sharing this information about using Fluidsynth and Scala for microtonal tuning with MIDI. It sounds like you have found a workaround to achieve the desired detuning and microtonal capabilities using sysex MIDI files. This can be useful for musicians and enthusiasts who are interested in exploring alternative tunings and microtonality.

By converting Scala's .scl files into sysex MIDI files, you can load them into Fluidsynth and apply the new tuning. Dragging and dropping these sysex MIDI files into the qsynth GUI allows you to easily switch the tuning of the active Fluidsynth instance.

This method provides a solution for avoiding reduced polyphony, program change issues, and unintended sound artifacts that can occur when using single-note pitch bend detuning on multiple channels.