I would like to play a synth with arabic scale: any tips?

Yes. But you can make your own. There are not any middle eastern maqams in there anyway. Look up maqam tuning, you can see how many cents each note would need to be adjusted.

Start with E and B 25 cents flat, for example, this approximates the maqam ‘Rast’.

very nice from you. just to be sure, using microtune as midi insert or using a scala (tun, scl) file on a vsti will produce the same results? or still using scala (tun, scl) have advantages over the midi insert ex: precision?

Maybe you could do a bit of research on what scala files do. (Is that too harsh a thing to say?)

yes i will do it. it’s fair.
thank you


Dear all,

I couldn’t do anything in MIDI inserts. Don’t know why.

So I duplicated my track and instrument, raised the fine tune to +27ct then cut and pasted the mobile notes which I wanted to raise from my initial track to my raised track.

This allowed me to be very mobile on the raised notes.
I was editing a bayati on D and G, but I also needed the E’s and B’s to also be regular flats while going down. This allowed flexibility on how much I can raise the “mobile” notes (I don’t like them to be fixed in marble).

The mobile notes are used differently if you’re playing in the Magreb, Egypt, The middle East, the Gulf, Turkey etc. so nothing is “fixed”.

Here’s a photo to show my settings.


It certainly isn’t a solution for recording you myth but editing only. You can play on your initial synth and cut/paste your mobile notes on your duplicated raised synth.

Good day to all.

I am an Arabian
Yes you can use the Microtuner effect but just for Steinberg instruments
and there are many Vsti supports Scl + Tun files like Omnishpere - u-he , Spire, Serum and many more…

I’ve made some of Tun files for Arabic scale " Rast , Bayat , Saba , several years ago
you can download them from this link

And now there are some special plugins for this purpose, like Fluid pitch, Taqsim microtuner

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Interesting! It looks like developers are becoming more interested in microtonal work.

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Great videos! A nice surprise to see Spyro Kotti there too!

Micro tuner works fine with Steinberg’s instruments, with some exceptions. (I’ve made a thread in issues but…)

Do these plug-ins work with Kontakt too? The free player?

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I checked out the Fluid Pitch product – pretty smart – it looks like it uses pitchbend plus some processing between the track midi output and the VST or physical synth input. So it would work with anything that understands pitchbend. They also talk about MPE, I suppose that would be for VSTs and synths that do MPE.

Kontakt can do individual pitch adjustment in its automation/scripting, e.g., a CC can be assigend to the function. (I think we talked about that in another topic?)

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I downloaded it to check it out. Very impressed with the pitchbend “stops”! It’s genius! It’s a diatonic pitchbend as it should be, perfect! It also plays nice with Spector, who can’t listen to microtuner.

Tried with pianoteq, plays fine. (Microtuner works on pianoteq too.)

Tried with HSO, ah bummer, doesn’t work well.
Neither with LSO solo strings in Kontakt (free player, no tuning capabilities there).

I think I’m buying this, it works!

Does HSO even accept pitchbend? Or is it required to set up the PB?

Yes as i know :slight_smile:

Yes exactly :+1:

It’s works on any instruments provided it contains -2 / +2 pitch bend

he said it’s works fine with this library but there’s a problem “out of tune” if he uses the pitch bend while playing any of tuned note by Fluid pitch plugin.

It accepts PB, and has an adjustable range. Actually that’s what I’m doing right now. Instead of using a dedicated “maqam strings” plugin, I am fighting with HSO + MicroTuner + painting Pitchbend (with different PB ranges depending on the maximum range I’d like to gliss in my track). Of course it takes loooooong, because the more ornamental a phrase becomes, the more tampering it needs. And it’s a case where it either passes and sounds good or it falls into the uncanny valley of listening to a nice string player playing nonsense, where you wonder “how can he suck that bad when he’s got such a nice sound?” :rofl:

@ANAFREE

Regarding Fluid Pitch + HSO:

HSO has an issue, where its ambience is still pitchbended even if the note has been released. So one has to turn all ambience off, and massage the instrument with reverb or delay of their choice. It’s not that Fluid Pitch doesn’t lower the right notes, it does work as it should.

Fluid Pitch + LSO solo:

Fluid Pitch still lowers the right notes, but what comes out of the instrument… no. Just no. I’ll spend some time and see why this happens, but right out of the box (just setting PB to where it should be) it’s not working as well as with say, Spector which was a very nice surprise!

I’m definitely buying this, I’ll just mess with the demo some days more.