[lewispollard]

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.

[justtocomment]

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!

[lewispollard]

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.