Moog Music Forum

Question to you guys who have experimented with microtuning...is there a way to tune/override the Voyager keyboard to do something *other* than the 12 equally spaced note western scale?

To me it just doesn't make any sense to have this out-of-tune carry-over from the piano world; I want A = 440hz, a major third 550hz, a fifth at 660hz, etc so the harmonies ring true. You can tune the three oscillators to make a perfect cord, but then when you overdub a melody over it you are back in "equal temperament" and need to bend the third "flat" so that it is in tune.

There must be someone who has figured out how to pull this off right? Didn't people like Wendy Carlos experiment with "just tuning"? How do you make say "just major" intonation happen on a Minimoog?? By the way someone pointed out the MOTM650 but not sure how to employ this or if there is an easier method. Appreciated!

Get a ribbon controller, theremin, etc. A keyboard is a Western instrument. If you want custom tunings (still western) try midi to cv conversion using Volta or something.

Yeah ribbons are ribbons and that's a great proven tool for that sort of playing.

But that's not the playing I want to do; that is to say no gliding around finding a note with a +/- 0-3 cent accuracy. I want to hit a 660hz tone spot on to a 1/10 of a cent accuracy, bam, and use the keyboard to do that, and then play a 440hz and have the relationship be correct. Now I can do that by tuning with my Peterson strobe to 440 and then overdubbing a 660, and continue by overdubbing every single note in the entire production all the way to harmonic greatness, yeah fun!

But what I'm wondering is if there is a dead-good studio tool out there for day in day out use that people have actually used and has proven reliable. I would imagine it in some way does MIDI to CV but not sure how to employ that best with the Voyager. I see a lot of "quick solutions" but I'm looking for something that has been proven to get the job done, if there is such a thing.

You can fine tune each note in Volta I am pretty sure.

Check this thread, too:

http://www.moogmusic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5143

I'd love for the Voyager to have the Phatty's microtuning capabilities, but I really don't think that's high on the list of OS upgrades...

Thanks for the link, interesting stuff...I was wondering about uses for the pitch jack as well.

Hmm I can't believe they figured it out for the Little Phatty but not for our poor Voyagers. Do we know if the micro-tuning implementation is simply "a software thing", which could be added to the Voyager in the future, or is it more complicated?

I'm not sure how precise you can be with this method, but if you have a vx-351, you can attenuate the keyboard output and run that back into the pitch input.

Q: has anyone tried the H-Pi TBX-1 Tuning Box, and got it working with the Voyager?

Looked like a great midi box to do alternate temperaments and supposedly compatible with the Voyager. But I've had it in the studio for a week and can't seem to get it to work.