Re: Fretless MIDI guitar

[Richard Zvonar <zvonar@zvonar.com>]

At 10:52 PM -0800 1/2/03, S V G wrote:

>   RZ:  This system has both advantages and disadvantages. It assumes that
>pitch bends will always start within a semitone of the nominal pitch,
>but it's quite common for some players to bend down from a whole tone
>or a minor third above.
>
>    SVG:  This shouldn't be too big of a difference to matter.

It might not make an audible difference in performance, but it might 
confuse things in a MIDI recording

>SVG:   This doesn't jive with my understanding of how MIDI works, 
>one note that gets bent up or down an octave?  Wouldn't that sound 
>weird at the extremes?

Seems to work OK in the Cyberbass. I'm not sure if they have a 
proprietary system in their Cyberbass tone module, in order to switch 
between multisamples on the basis of pitch bend values. I'll look 
into it and get back to you.

>
>   RZ:  ...has some interesting possibilities for fretless and even 
>fretted MIDI guitars. For instance, it allows playing with flexible 
>intonation. Microtonal players (whose pitch discrimination can be 
>uncanny) would be able to play guitar synth in Just  or other 
>intonations without the synth having microtonal features. Even 
>though many synths have tuning capabilities, it requires switching 
>presets in order to change from one to another. With a MIDI pitch 
>bend based system the intonation would be left entirely to the 
>player.
>
>   SVG:  Again, I'm not sure that I understand what you are referring to 
>here.

Perhaps I didn't explain it clearly. I'm talking about a dynamically 
"floating" intonation system where the player has complete control 
over the intonation rather than having to work within a predetermined 
tuning system. In other words, rather than having a scale that is set 
up with each step at a fixed frequency, the player could play each 
note at whatever frequency was contextually appropriate at the 
moment. This would allow migration through a variety of intonation 
systems in the course of a performance without having to set up 
several different tuning presets and switch from one to another.


>And the pitch bend accuracy would be to the nearest 1.5625 cents 
>(100 cents divided by 64) which is close enough for rock 'n' roll 
>(though some would moan in a most pitiful way).

That may be sufficient resolution for melodic playing, but if you 
want to play pure harmonic intervals and chords without beats its' 
not good enough.

>With the Kurzweil, you set up one octave and all the octaves are 
>locked into that same tuning.  With Emu, you have to set the tuning 
>for every single note which is more labor intensive yet it offers 
>much more flexibility

A better way to do it might be to allow the option of copying the 
tuning a range of notes into different octaves. That way you could 
easily do "intonation splits" where some octaves were in one 
intonation and other octaves where in another.


>Regardless of whether you are using a fretless or a fretted guitar, 
>you can set a user definable scale on your synth, turn off the 
>pitchbend, and anything you play on your guitar will ipso facto 
>sound within that scale that you defined.

That's great for fixed-pitch playing, but if you wanted to have a 
basic tuning PLUS microtonal ornaments you'd be out of luck.

>
>   RZ:  BTW - Middle C is "C4" no matter what Yamaha says.
>
>SVG:  I know that MIDI was developed with several musicians on the 
>consulting panel.  What were they thinking?  That they could just 
>ignore the modern acoustic usage?  Especially since there seems to 
>be no overwhelming reason that they couldn't just keep C4 as C4.

I became aware of this after I'd been using Performer together with a 
Yamaha TX816 in 1986. Then I was doing some beta testing for E-mu and 
they were using C4. I actually flagged that as an error until I did a 
little research into musical acoustic standards. I actually got David 
Zicarelli to add a C4 option to the number objects in Max.

-- 

______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com