I’m starting to learn my way around Cubase; one of the first things I’ve tried to do is get Hermode tuning working. So I created a little project with one MIDI track using Etude as its instrument. I believe that to turn on Hermode tuning, I have to check the following boxes:
and tried rendering it with the two Hermode boxes above checked or unchecked, and correspondingly with the HMT Type set to Reference or None.
When I play it back, I can’t hear any difference–and I’m sure that when I’ve tried Hermode tuning in other contexts, the difference seems obvious to me.
In case you want to reproduce the problem, here’s the project file:
I don’t understand what you mean by that. I load some instruments under HALion and it is clear when I listen that HMT is doing nothing. If HALion supports HMT, I should be able to get it to work somehow. How do I figure out what I need to do in order to make it work?
After some further experimentation I am not sure if what I wrote below is true. I tried several instruments in Halion Sonic and so far they all responded to HMT.
Halion (Sonic) is like a host for instruments. Generally Halion suports HMT because it generally supports Note Expression. However, each of the individual instruments (presets, programs, whatever you like to call them) need to also suppport this. Unfortunately only a few of them do.
If you have the big, paid version of Halion you can edit some of the presets, programs, whatever you like to call them, so that they should support it, by adding Note Expression support to them. This is not available for Halion Sonic, though.
To add: HMT seems to be a niche feature that has gained little attraction.
As for whether HMT is a niche feature: I don’t know. What I do know:
It makes an obvious difference in how a piece of music sounds.
More generally, interest appears to be growing in microtonal pitch adjustments, driven partly by early musicians and world musicians on one side of the spectrum and artists such as Aphex Twin and Angine de Poitrine on the other side.
I don’t know any way to test whether a preset is able to use the pitch commands mentioned in Werner’s post aside from loading the preset and trying it out. Use the Microtuner midi plugin to test,this is quite quick.
Did you read the post I linked to where the programmer spoke about the function?
Here’s another discussion, if you search the forum or web you’ll probably find others
A few thoughts –
Microtonal music has been alive and well for many, many years and it’s used widely in music in many regions of the world aside from western music.
Hermode tuning doesn’t help with microtonality, even though it uses that capability in cubase. HMT tries to tune chords in Just Intonation.
Yes, I did see it–but I don’t know enough about the internals of how HMT information translates into changes in audio pitch to know what to look for in order to determine whether it will work with a particular VST.
I meant: If I try using HMT and don’t hear any difference (and I agree with you that the difference is really obvious), is there a way to figure out whether a particular VST has an option that can be enabled to accept the HMT pitch adjustments, or do I just need to try whatever I can think of and hope for the best?
If the user manual of a particular instrument doesn’t mention micro tuning, the likelihood it supports it is probably low. I would still fire away an email to the developer or post on their forums, if they have them, and ask. If nothing else, it would hopefully notify them that there is interest for such a feature.
