Topic: !12tET tunings and Pianoteq (n00b question)....

Good day.

I'm interested in doing some microtonal work on the
Pianoteq, and have been impressed with both what I've
seen and heard, and also with the various example tunings
I can load. I hope you won't mind a few questions.

I use Scala to do my tunings, but heretofore I've used
versions of a scala file that lists every single MIDI
key number and an associated pitch. To make a long story
short, it kind of looks like this:

; the standard gregory tuning
;
;
[Exact Tuning]
note 0= 1286.421047
note 1= 1313.685139
.
.
.
note 126= 13082.511045
note 127= 13201.953854

This doesn't seem to work very well with Pianoteq,
so I thought I'd ask about making things that *do*
work.

Briefly put, here's what the scale I use looks like.
It's tuned from F natural and uses the following
ratios:

f - 1/1 (349.222)
f# - 21/20
g - 11/10
g# - 9/8
a - 6/5
a# - 27/20
b - 7/5
c - 3/2
c# - 63/40
d - 8/5
d# - 33/20
e - 9/5

It looks as though many of the example files are
tuned from c natural, so my first run was to figure
that I could recalculate what these ratios would be
using 3 as the base for ratios. After some quality
math time, I think I get this:

! my scale from f (starting from c)
!
My scale
12
!
21/20
16/15
11/10
6/5
4/3
7/5
22/15
3/2
8/5
9/5
28/15
2/1

which seems to load and run.

My question is:

Is there a way to create a scala-style file
that preserves the F at 349.22 and calculates
the ratios from that?

Thanks in advance for your help,
gregory taylor

Re: !12tET tunings and Pianoteq (n00b question)....

Your final Scala file looks ok.

Now, you need to edit a new .kbm file (keyboard mapping) in order to choose your special tuning reference.

Something like this should work:

! F tuning
!
! Size of map. The pattern repeats every so many keys:
12
! First MIDI note number to retune:
0
! Last MIDI note number to retune:
127
! Middle note where scale degree 0 is mapped to:
65
! Reference note for which frequency is given (60 = middle c):
65
! Frequency to tune the above note to (floating point e.g. 440.0):
349.2220
! Scale degree to consider as formal octave (determines difference in pitch
! between adjacent mapping patterns):
12
! Mapping.
! The numbers represent scale degrees mapped to keys. The first degree is for
! the given middle note, the next for subsequent higher keys.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11


Load this file in Keymap and you're done.

You can do lots of cool things with kbm files, like mirror your keyboard:
Left-handed piano !


Nikos