Microtuning

Here,
excuse me if I'm showering the forum with stuff,
but I've only really 'discovered' it in earnest this week with the release of OS 1.70
(as the YahooGroop seems to be on the wane,
and I'm banned from the DPSWerld EZboard

.....but anyways,
it became apparent to me that a fair proportion of the Feature Requests and Tech Queries I sent to Akai's former UK distributor (Arbiter) vanished into the ether...
Since some were still in my email archives,
I've been re-sending them to [email protected]
and I'll repost them here to, for interest.....

Here's some gubbins on MICROTUNING.....


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I was playing around with the microtuning facilities
on the Akai MPC4000 recently
(select PROGRAM mode > F3 MISC > "SCALE" block,
which lets you adjust the temperament of each semitone in the octave)


The MPC4000s tuning resolution appears to be to the nearest cent
(1 cent = 1 / 1200th of an 8ve)
Although this is a nice round number, it's actually verging on the
"not really very good" side of usuable for doing serious microtonal stuff

(the problem is that, unlike the universal compromise of equal
temperament, other termperaments generally depend on the
use of completely pure number ratios, which almost entirely
eliminate 'beats' between intervals..... and tuning to the nearest
cent isn't accurate enough to eliminate beats....!
....so although the MPC4000 sports some handy preset
temperaments such as "classic just" and "arabic", these really
sound a bit ugly in places and not like they're meant to!)

(As a historical comparison, back in the late 1970s, the 8bit
microprocessor controlled Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 rev 3.2
offered temperament tuning calibration to 0.59 cents, a whole
50% better than the 2002 MPC4000! ....
and most of Yamaha's early-mid-1980s DX7 family could
manage to the nearest 1.5 cents....
....so the MPC4000 is actually lagging behind technology
from a 1/4 of a century ago in this respect!)
....and in contrast, the modern MIDI Tuning Spec
(http://www.midi.org/about-midi/tuning.shtml ) provides
for 3-byte 7-bit resolution over temperament
(ie to the nearest 0.0061 cents - 241 times more
accurate than the MPC4000)


ANYWAYS - my question is -
can you tell me if the MPC4000's tuning resolution, which
is to the nearest cent, is dictated by the hardware?
or is it simply a software choice which someone thought
was a nice round number (and could thus be fairly easily improved
in an OS upgrade?)
(The SysEx controls for Program Temperament don't provide
much insight either.... they're currently matched to the resolution
of the software, but using "signed words" etc for the data values,
they could easily be given finer resolution)

If it is possible to improve the tuning resolution in software,
please can this be logged as a feature request,
as it really would make the MPC4000 a very powerful
instrument for microtuning.
(Note also that the MPC4000 uses it's own SysEx to
control microtuning, rather than follow the MIDI tuning spec....)


SOME MICROTUNING HINTS for other users -
although the MPC4000 doesn't allow you to change the number
of divisions in the 8ve away from 12 (and no great complaint
here, as the MPC merely reflects the MIDI note number standard,
which has 12 semitones per octave) -
it would be fairly easy to work around this to add more
more divisions per 8ve (for instance, to do Equal Tempered
Quarter Tone tuning, which requires 24 divisions per octave,
or other 20th century stuff like 19-tone, 31 tone, and Harry Partch
and Wendy Carlos things......)
- because each Zone is also individually tuneable to the nearest cent,
real time Zone switching (on a suitable controller message) could
be imployed to further sub-divide each of the 12 scale degrees
into up to 4 subdivisions.
OR
multiple programs could be used, each responding on different MIDI
channels, spanning the required scale degrees between them
(this latter technique would even let you do crazy stuff like
Mercator's 53 scale divisions per octave!)



I'm afraid I must close with a gripe about the documentation in
the MPC4000 Reference Manual (English edition, v1.0)
on Program Temperment.
It almost reads like a parody of bad documentation!!

I mean here are the "explanations" of some of the things you'll
see on the MPC4000 screen:

"ORCHESTRAL ...... Orchestral"
"WERKMEISTER...... Werkmeister
"ARABIAN ....... Arabic"

Ha ha! laughable!

It doesn't even tell you that the tuning units you see on the
screen are in units of the nearest cent,
or really explain that only the "USER" temperament really
lets you do anything,
and the other 8 ones are simply handy presets of things
you could set up yourself in "USER"
I'm not even really sure what the folk in Japan
were meaning by presets of "1/5 comma meantone"
"1/4 comma meantone" temperaments,
as a tuning resolution only to the nearest cent
makes the achievment of 1/4 or 1/5ths of
pythagoreans commas rather marginal.

you complain alot

um.... f*ck off, you lame tit?

Do you know ANYTHING about microtuning and microtonal music?!?
Have you ANY idea how practical the MPC4000 would be for making it??!

My point to Akai with this feature enhancement request was simply, that, they'd gone to a fair amount of trouble to implement some sort of token microtuning facility, but (like oh so many of the features on the machine), it doesn't look like real musicians actually road tested it for usability - more like a couple of developers had a try on it for half an hour and went "oh! that's pretty neat" and nerded off onto the next bit of coding.......
...HOWEVER, if the limitations were just due to an ill-judged software parameter (tuning resolution = 1 cent), the feature could be GREATLY improved with little effort.
....on the other hand, if the tuning resolution is hardware limited, then we're screwed.



As for my **** here at the documentation -
it is farcially poor
(the "explanation" of the microtuning presets:
"ORCHESTRAL ...... Orchestral"
"WERKMEISTER...... Werkmeister
"ARABIAN ....... Arabic"
I mean, I don't know if you've ever read the "Brand New Monty Python Papperbok" from 1973.....
it had a comedy dictionary in it....... read rather like Akai's explanations there...... )

Anyways,
I never even got any sort of reply back from Akai or their UK distributors from the above communication - let's hope the re-send gets an answer this time.

Honestly, if people like Bob Moague, Don Buchla and Dave Smith had had such total @rseholic indifference in communicating with musicians and their needs in the 60s and 70s as Akai Unprofessional Inc do now, there wouldn't BE any electronic musicial instruments today.....

Yeah I remember you from both of the other akai forums and you complained more and louder than anyone else there too.... guess since youre so much smarter then everyone else and since youre a such big rock star in your own mind that it's almost an obligation of yours to be completely f#ing annoying. also the whole british shtick that you do is extremely retarded. please stop

feline1 wrote:The MPC4000s tuning resolution appears to be to the nearest cent
(1 cent = 1 / 1200th of an 8ve)
As a historical comparison, back in the late 1970s, the 8bit
microprocessor controlled Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 rev 3.2
offered temperament tuning calibration to 0.59 cents, a whole
50% better than the 2002 MPC4000! ....
and most of Yamaha's early-mid-1980s DX7 family could
manage to the nearest 1.5 cents....
....and in contrast, the modern MIDI Tuning Spec
(http://www.midi.org/about-midi/tuning.shtml ) provides
for 3-byte 7-bit resolution over temperament
(ie to the nearest 0.0061 cents - 241 times more
accurate than the MPC4000

As you say, it's mmm :

feline1 wrote:ha ha! laughable!

"No, *your* ma", etc etc'... /yawns/