temperament
Presets, templates and the good practice
05/10/19 12:00 Filed in: Creative Work
All considered, making an universal preset schema that can work for all your sounds, and arranging the sounds in a template that will make your ensemble sound coherent, is not dissimilar to tuning the instruments of an orchestra in the old times.
With digital instruments, we no longer need to spend time tuning, unless you have the old-fashioned idea of calling in some acoustic instrument. In the pre-digital era, you had to accurately tune everything, including some analogue synth.
Renaissance and Early Baroque – a bit earlier than the birth of the opera, and at the times of Monteverdi – you had to choose a tuning among the many experimental ones. Bach had not yet come with his propaganda for completely equal tuning, good for all the scales. Meantone tuning, for example, was one good for great sounding major thirds and decent sounding fifths, and you had to think to the most used ‘modes’ to choose the best sounding intervals. You had to patiently tune by ear by listening to beatings between intervals, and ultimately following your taste.
Creating presets and templates is our preliminary work on what would lead to great sounding music. You have to think to the music that you will want to do, and decide which articulations, which layout, which selection controls and which space to use. It’s nothing more than what our ancestors did with a tuning fork and good ears: tuning their instruments to make them their immediately collaborative musical partners.
With digital instruments, we no longer need to spend time tuning, unless you have the old-fashioned idea of calling in some acoustic instrument. In the pre-digital era, you had to accurately tune everything, including some analogue synth.
Renaissance and Early Baroque – a bit earlier than the birth of the opera, and at the times of Monteverdi – you had to choose a tuning among the many experimental ones. Bach had not yet come with his propaganda for completely equal tuning, good for all the scales. Meantone tuning, for example, was one good for great sounding major thirds and decent sounding fifths, and you had to think to the most used ‘modes’ to choose the best sounding intervals. You had to patiently tune by ear by listening to beatings between intervals, and ultimately following your taste.
Creating presets and templates is our preliminary work on what would lead to great sounding music. You have to think to the music that you will want to do, and decide which articulations, which layout, which selection controls and which space to use. It’s nothing more than what our ancestors did with a tuning fork and good ears: tuning their instruments to make them their immediately collaborative musical partners.