Isn’t there a formula that you could make that would automatically attenuate or quantize the keyboard pitch cv to quartertones? Like some sort of fractionalized transpose function or something?
I’ve done this with the Voyager (courtesy of cp251) but my usage of it was rather limited.
EricK
I would guess that doing various non-12 equal temperments (like quarter-tone which is 24-TET) would be fairly straightforward since you’re still dealing with equal logarithmic increments. Doing just temperaments or other scales with unequal steps might be trickier, but this is something I’d love to see happen.
quarter tone scales are done by dividing the ingoing voltage of a keyboard to 0.5 V/oct for an pitch input of 1 Moog (= 1 V/oct). So 24 keys (a are eqal tempered scaled across one octave of the oscillator pitch.
Doing other scales need special calibrated resistors for each keys voltage output. Easy to do by adding trimmers (multi turn ones) on each keys voltage rail were the original in series soldered ones are on an old Moog CV keyboard. Will not work on new keyboard actions as used on the Voyager and the RME.
If you are a techy/geeky sort, you can build a MIDI to CV converter and program the note to output CV to whatever value you want. Maybe Volta or whatever that software is called could have a module written for it to do that. Equal temperment I can do with my Encore.
On the Voyager and LP this might be able to be done with firmware, altering the look-up table for calibration. It might require the instrument to be recalibrated for each tuning, though.
Well its no question that Im no engineer, but I was thinking that this could be done in the software like if you were to add a submenu for tunings, similar to pitch transposition, then automatically just divide and quantize the keyboard pitch voltage (for quarter tones), without having to make any major changes to the pitch voltage electronics.
I guess anything like this looks god in theory but is a bit more complicated upon implementation.
Thanks for the input, guys.
Eric
In the mean time, you might also want to experiment with the Scala software:
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/
One of its features is the ability to send real-time MIDI pitch-bend data in order to get various scales out of any MIDI keyboard. I haven’t used it for that, but people say it works.