cemetery star

fallen tree bark, color inverted

microtuning virtual instruments

For composers interested in creating microtonal music in a sequencer, here are two powerful virtual instruments that can help.

MOTU MachFive 3

MachFive is the best synthesizer/sampler hybrid I’ve come across that allows the Scala file format natively.  It accepts both the standard .scl scale file and the .kbm keyboard map files. These files created via Scala itself, or by using the free version of Custom Scale Editor.  The only trick to make it work with the built-in sample libraries that it comes with, is that you must first initialize a micro-tuner script on each layer of samples, or “key-groups” (i.e. sustain, release, pedal noise, etc.). Other sound libraries that Acoustic Samples makes are certainly worth checking out, like the OldBlackGrand shown in the picture.  With this instrument and many others, you only need to set a single microtuner script once for the patch.  Awesome.

NI Kontakt 3 (or higher)

You can also retune Kontakt, but a little more work is needed.  There are a few third-party KSP scripts available that will translate Scala data into the language of Kontakt.  For instance, both Scala and CSE generate a very simple Kontakt retuning script.  Torsten Anders also created a useful script for cyclic-scales, as mentioned at the end of this forum topic.  Another very well written script I use is Robert Strauss’ Scala2Kontakt Microtuner, which accounts for release sample tuning nicely.

Depending on your patch’s scripting, any of these tuning scripts may produce some unexpected results or create clashes and omissions between sample layers.  I believe some experimentation is necessary in placing a tuning script  before or after a patch’s performance script, and determining what works best.  By using earlier versions of sample libraries designed for Kontakt 3 or higher have yielded the most positive results, since they tend to have less complicated performance scripts.  I’ve found that the fancier performances scripts used in Kontakt 4 & 5 often get in the way of these retuning scripts.

saxophone inspiration and imagination

Several amazing saxophonists have inspired me greatly in the last few weeks.  In particular, those mentioned here I see as having a deeply personal mastery of the instrument.  Their performances defy my expectations as to what a saxophone ‘is’, what ‘it’ should sound like, and what ‘it’ can do when played these ways—to me “it” becomes something more, from outside of this world, re-imagined with a deeply subtle mastery of the instrument’s resonances.

Earl Bostic - “Up There In Orbit”

Michael Ibrahim - “Ali” by Alex Mincek

Evan Parker - Solo Tenor Improvisation

John Butcher - Solo Soprano Improvisation

If you’d like to check out more, be sure to also investigate these incredible saxophonists:
Anthony Braxton, Peter Brotzman, James Carter, Eric Dolphy and Pharaoh Sanders, just to name a few.

the creek

A video meditation featuring a small creek in New Jersey.

into the sound

Here are two inspiring documentaries by visionaries in music, sound, and perception.

Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen

“Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed, we are no longer the same… and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being; music.  

What are we?  Just storage of information.  But when you can become like a radio… Then you’re not interested in yourself at all, there’s nothing to express, really. And you become very careful in detecting what is self-expression, and what is expression from something that comes in you.  That is amazing; your self, where you are constantly in a state of surprise, amaze.  You are amazed that what happens to you.  And when this state is achieved; arrived, even in short-term moments, then you will be quite astonished what happens through your body…”

Melodyne inventor Peter Neubäcker:

“…If you continue this schema, you can construct for each overtone, an undertone series, or the other way around, for every undertone, an overtone series.  And then you get the Lambdoma…

…Here we have infinity, and here we have zero. And here, where the two lines meet, is zero divided by zero, from which all notes emerge.  Not from the infinite and not from nothingness, but from where the infinite and nothingness meet.  That’s the point from which all notes emerge.”