Microtonal Music in Live – Scale of Fifths

Microtonal music can bring a whole new meaning to your music. When you start exploring Microtonal music you are exploring the edge of what is possible. This article will look deep into making Microtonal music in Ableton Live. But to start lets look at what Tunning and Temperament is.

TUNING AND HOW IT DIFFERS FROM TEMPERAMENT

There is a difference between that pitch reference, that concert tuning, and temperament or scale you build from that pitch reference. When we are talking about tuning there are 2 things we need to keep in mind and understand how they are separate, but interrelated.

Most music and DAWS are set to the reference pitch at A=440hz. All this means is that the first note, that all others are built from, is at 440. There are many different ways to calculate what the frequency of the next note is. This is when you get into tuning schemes, and temperament.

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If you are intersted in 432hz based music then check out my 432 Essentials. It will give you a huge library of sounds in 432 and Scale Of Fifths temperament. 

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There has been endless books and theories on Temperament and the basic mathematical structures of tuning. We will not go deep into this subject. If you are interested I highly suggest this blog http://www.roelhollander.eu/ It has a lot of information on tuning and the theories behind it.

To overview lets just stick with music that fits a perfect circular system, like western music, and look at Equal Temperament, Just Intonation, and Scale of Fifths.

What is Temperament:

“In musical tuning, a temperament is a system of tuning which slightly compromises the pure intervals of just intonation in order to meet other requirements of the system. Most instruments in modern Western music are tuned in the equal temperament system. Temperament is especially important for keyboard instruments, which typically allow a player to play only the pitches assigned to the various keys, and lack any way to alter the pitch of a note in performance. Historically, the use of just intonation,pythagorean tuning and meantone temperament meant that such instruments could sound “in tune” in one key, or some keys, but would then have more dissonance in other keys.”

We won’t go too deep into this, but this all boils down to one simple fact. The world is not a perfect place. As amazing as humans are with mathematics, perception, and bending them for expression, music has the innate flaw of an imperfect system. So to try and make up for it in western musical traditions we made a compromise. That is where Equal Temperament came in. We detuned all the notes that make up our twelve notes per octave. This means everything is slightly out of harmony, but the trade off is we can move from key to key and it sounds relatively good.

Creating Micro Tonal Music in Ableton Live

Now lets look at how we can change the temperament in Ableton Live. Live does not give us any settings or tools to globally change the sets temperament. We can however go in and create new instruments in whatever temperament we want.  As an example we will be looking at the Scale Of Fifths tunning.

Video Example

The first thing to keep in mind is we have to Detune each individual note in the 12 note octave. We can do this with Instrument Racks. Here is an instrument rack with one sampler in it.

This way we can Detune the note.   So in this case I can tune down the C Note. Now we need to be able to make different chains for the different notes though. We do this by making multiple chains in the instrument rack.

You can right click, or double click on a mac, to create a new chain. This way you can make 12 chains. One for each note. The only problem now is if you play a note it plays all 12 chains.  So we need to make it so each chain only plays a single note. We do this with the MIDI Effect called Scale.

By putting this effect in each chain before the instrument we can decide to let one note though. You do this by clicking all the orange squares on the grid until you only have one, being the note you want to pass through and play.

You have to do this for each note in each chain.

The last image showed the C note, but now with c# I can just adjust the Base Note in the MIDI Scale Effect to C# and now it will only let C# be played. I will also dial in the detuning of that note to fit the Scale of Fifths Temperament.

Here is an image that shows what you Detune each note to be..

For Operator you Detune it a little different. Here is how you would Detune Operator.

When I create the chains for a new instrument I color them and name them. Here is an image of that:

Once you build this  you can just take any instrument and drag it into every chain. So you will have the same instrument repeated 12 times. You will then have to retune it slightly to fit the Scale of Fifths.

Here is a basic Instrument Rack for Analog as an Example: