The French-Canadian Quebec based duo, Angine de Poitrine (Angina Pectoris, Chest Pain in English), have gone viral. The guitarist uses a custom double neck 6-string+bass, both fretted microtonally, to play mesmerising grooves through a pedal board /looper, The drummer is as tight as! They also wear polka-dot costumes and masks, which just adds to the whole experience. It’s amazing stuff! So fresh.
So the question is, if this really takes-off big time, do you think SB might be persuaded to do a custom virtual MIDI keyboard to include microtonal intervals anytime soon? And would it be possible to read/write a typical Angine de Poitrine riff in the score editor?
Hi,
I think chances are very low that Steinberg will introduce a microtonal MIDI keyboard jumping on that train
But there’s hope, there are two things you can do:
Analog way: Apply additional frets on your bass/guitar with glue. It’s easy to do and this way you don’t have to permanently commit to that sort of scaling.
Digital way: The easiest way is to set up a VST Instrument (e.g. Halion bass/guitar) and limit pitchbend upwards to a whole tone. Now, you can use squares to ride the pitchbend at exactly 50 whenever you the in-between pitches. You can copy/paste the automation whenever it’s needed
Yes, Variaudio should work, too, on monophonic signals. It might be a bit more cumbersome without the ability to copy/paste automation but you’ll have another visual display which might lead to interesting decisions.
It might be strange to play a note twice on a bass/guitar knowing that every second note will end up being pitched up a quartertone. Worth a try, though. Definetly an interesting alternative
FYI, Dorico does have very extensive support for microtonality:
This is possible because Dorico works at a higher level of abstraction than MIDI notes: all pitches in Dorico are rational numbers and then they are converted to MIDI at the last moment before playback and also use VST3 per-note tuning (or a fallback to using pitch bend).
Cubase is designed for (integer) MIDI pitches, so it would be much harder to have the ‘full’ support for microtonality. However, aside from the Hermode tuning, it’s also possible to use custom tuning scales in HALion: Steinberg
This is a day-dream request from 2,5 years ago. I think slipping MIDI vertically would be the “easiest” approach, both from an editing standpoint for most of us less technical-minded users, and from a data-overview standpoint.
The real (technical) question that I can’t hope to even know to answer, is whether such “offset” positions (e.g. graphically between Eb and E on the keyboard) would be a valid MIDI<2.0 message, or would it be a note event+pitchbend packet? And what would happen then with extreme pitch-bend oscillations when it would still control the sound after note release? (For VST3, it could be a tuning parameter per note, much easier.)
But then, could the score editor derive some standard microtonal accidentals from these values (note+tuning) after rounding up or down to within a tolerance threshold and display those? Even without offering the extended support for tuning systems that Dorico Pro offers?
For me it’s also a little amusing to see that a programming language from around 500 years ago is in this instance more elegant and feature-complete than a 50 year protocol.
This looks really nice. I think they made a huge step in supporting scales other than 12TET. Now only the visuals in the key editor need to change as well. I can imagine that could make Live more attractive in the Arabic and Indian world, amongst others.
For me it’s also a little amusing to see that a programming language from around 500 years ago is in this instance more elegant and feature-complete than a 50 year protocol.