How to get microtones from a chromatic midi controller?
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 4:48 pm
(This is not technically a question about a recorders or sequences, but I find no better place for it. Please suggest a better place if you find it!)
I recently bought my first midi controller, a Lekholm DM48 harmonica which contains 12 pressure sensors and has the form of a chromatic harmonica. As for the midi, I thought "I'm a long time Linux user, how hard can it be?", and 15+ hours later when I finally got it working i knew that "pretty darn hard" is a highly accurate answer.
At last, I've got Jack running, configured all the details (where I now know that the Devil indeed is!), sound card, pulseaudio, pulseaudio --kill, options in jack, idiosyncrasies of alsamixer, the colours of my socks, and other tiny thigs that apparently must be set just right, and it finally works fine both together with Qsynth and Synaddsubfx. I've been using this setup for a few weeks, and I'm comfortable and very happy with it. With comfort comes luxury problems though, and those wouldn't-it-be-neat-if-s I assume most of us go through.
My current problem concerns microtonality: (if this isn't a luxury problem I don't know what is)
How do I go about if I want to play a chromatic scale, but with added micro-tones?
My controller only seems to output chromatic notes. I've found the tuning option in Zyn, where I can take chromatic notes I don't use and retune them to the microtones I do use, but ideally I would like at least 11 of the chromatic notes and at least 2 additional ones, which sums to 13; more than the number of chromatic notes my controller cares to acknowledge. One idea I've had is to program my controller so that the positions where I want micro-tones sound a few octaves lower than the rest, and somehow make the synth understand that low notes should be transposed up by say 5 octaves and a quarter note, but I have no idea how to do this.
Does anyone know a softsynth that lets me do this, and if so how do I get it to do so?
Is there some other solution?
I recently bought my first midi controller, a Lekholm DM48 harmonica which contains 12 pressure sensors and has the form of a chromatic harmonica. As for the midi, I thought "I'm a long time Linux user, how hard can it be?", and 15+ hours later when I finally got it working i knew that "pretty darn hard" is a highly accurate answer.
At last, I've got Jack running, configured all the details (where I now know that the Devil indeed is!), sound card, pulseaudio, pulseaudio --kill, options in jack, idiosyncrasies of alsamixer, the colours of my socks, and other tiny thigs that apparently must be set just right, and it finally works fine both together with Qsynth and Synaddsubfx. I've been using this setup for a few weeks, and I'm comfortable and very happy with it. With comfort comes luxury problems though, and those wouldn't-it-be-neat-if-s I assume most of us go through.
My current problem concerns microtonality: (if this isn't a luxury problem I don't know what is)
How do I go about if I want to play a chromatic scale, but with added micro-tones?
My controller only seems to output chromatic notes. I've found the tuning option in Zyn, where I can take chromatic notes I don't use and retune them to the microtones I do use, but ideally I would like at least 11 of the chromatic notes and at least 2 additional ones, which sums to 13; more than the number of chromatic notes my controller cares to acknowledge. One idea I've had is to program my controller so that the positions where I want micro-tones sound a few octaves lower than the rest, and somehow make the synth understand that low notes should be transposed up by say 5 octaves and a quarter note, but I have no idea how to do this.
Does anyone know a softsynth that lets me do this, and if so how do I get it to do so?
Is there some other solution?
