Comment by justtocomment | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justtocomment | Hacker News Reader

This makes me so happy!

I use the Deluge to learn music theory, synthesis and a bit of composition and it's so much more fun making music in the garden than to spend another hour sitting in front of the computer.

Synthstrom Audio seems committed to support this device for years to come: they sell spare parts, organize upgrades to newer hardware versions (some more cosmetic, recently though a screen replacement from 7 segment LED to OLED display), offer "refreshment" (new silicon pads, potentiometer and encoders).

Things I hope can be implemented:

* Smooth scrolling: currently Deluge only scrolls in increments of a whole "screen", e.g. 16 steps with a step being anything from a few bars down to something like 256ths of a whole note. This makes it hard to follow and awkward to edit pieces that are not in 4/4 time signature.

* "Accidentals" in scale mode: currently every row displays notes of the same pitch. Deluge allows arbitrary subsets of the chromatic scale (as long as it's at least 7 notes) to form a scale, and in "scale mode" rows for notes not in that set remain hidden. To "escape" the scale one has to switch to "chromatic mode" (a row for every note on the chromatic scale) or to create a new scale by adding notes to rows not in the current scale in chromatic mode. With only 8 rows that means that not even a single octave fits on the screen any more. I hope that something like accidentals can be implemented where the sharpened/flattened notes would simply show up in a different color on the row of the scale note, akin to the use of accidentals on staff notation.

* Support for microtonal scales

* A master compressor

All in all the Deluge is a wonderful piece of gear and I wish Synthstrom Audio well. I really hope going Open Source will benefit their business as much as customers are going to benefit from this.

Are you aware of any hw sequencers that already have microtonal scale support? It's something I'm keenly interested in, and one of my synths (Korg Monologue) has built in support, but the others don't, would be nice to be able to drive them all in the same tuning externally.

I'm not aware of any HW sequencers supporting microtonal scales. If you're talking about MIDI sequencing I don't think that's baked into the standard: As far as I know, MIDI doesn't have a concept of scales or tuning. Notes are sent as values ranging from 0 to 127 and it's up to the receiver to interpret that - usually by assigning equal temprament notes to these numbers (this is, I assume, how the Korg *logue synthesizers implement their scales - by interpreting the note values differently)

Things may improve if MIDI 2 ever becomes widespread. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

When sequencing monophonic sequences, one might be able to work around this by adding a MIDI processor into the signal path that prepends certain pitch bend messages to certain note values - but I can't say for certain how well this work, I never tried it.

Here's a link with some ideas (and scripts) to implement microtonal synth voices with today's firmware version of the deluge:

https://forums.synthstrom.com/discussion/comment/16257/#Comm...

Hope that helps!

Thanks for your insight and the link! I know very little about the hardware side of things but am pretty familiar with microtonality in DAWs and soft synths.

You're correct, MIDI is very primitive in its support of microtonality, and afaik MIDI 2.0 improves it only a little: the general solution in OG MIDI is to have it send pitch wheel messages along with the note to bend it to the correct pitch, but it's limited in precision, and prevents you from using the pitch wheel for other purposes. You can do it polyphonically, but only by assigning each note in the chord its own MIDI channel, which limits it to 16 simultaneous notes.

MIDI 2.0 doesn't directly support remapping to different EDOs or tunings or anything like that, so microtonal support is still a kind of hack, but it does at least have a dedicated pitch adjustment parameter now in the note on message, with a higher precision, which is separate to the pitch wheel message - so you can use both. Still clunky but it's better.

There's also various standards for OG MIDI like MTS (MIDI Tuning Standard) or MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) but it's very rare for HW synths to support these, and even soft synths that support them are few and far between.

I guess probably the most straightforward way of doing microtonal hardware sequenced synths is by using modular synths, funnily enough - none of these digitally quantised note values there! I just read the Cirklon sequencer, for example, support the MTS standard to store alternate tuning and can then output CV to modulars based off those tunings directly.

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