Dronal improvisation on Tonal Plexus microtonal keyboard

A melodic improvisation over a drone using my Tonal Plexus keyboard from H-Pi Instruments.

Produced with REAPER software, "Automat" software synth plug-in, some other synth plug-in, along with a Chapman Stick bass part and a simple MIDI drum background.

By setting up a sustained drone in one synth and then switching the armed track away before stopping, the drone continues indefinitely. Then, the other synth is set to a monophonic setting with portamento. Though not done here, this could be switched with some quick command so that the drone / harmony could be changed on the fly, thus creating more complex homophonic music. The MIDI signal can also be routed to split the keyboard to have a chord-section and a monophonic melody section. I hope to do more with these ideas in the future.

Note: the slight timbre change in the melody is due to the keyboard's automatic velocity-randomization interacting with the synth. Unfortunately, the keyboard is not touch sensitive, but it offers both randomization and a whole-keyboard velocity control via a footpedal.

Thanks to Doug Jones for the camera work.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• microtonal
• improvisation
• jam
• keyboard
• melody

[TheUnforgivent]

Hello. Is there a way to use the Tonal Plexus with things like VSTs to make it sound like true microtonal instruments? Thanks

[nphony]

@TheUnforgivent I don't know what you mean "true microtonal instruments" but the TPX is just a MIDI controller, so it works with plugins. In this video, I was running through VST instruments. Only trouble is, it needs to be set for multichannel pitch-bend-independent — and so that means a bunch of set-up and duplicate VSTs, one for each channel. A few plugins work without this though, like PianoTeq

[sirvidia]

couldn't you just use a long ribbon controller and play fretless to get any microtone you want?

[nphony]

@sirvidia Yes you could, but then you couldn't be as precise as easily. With a ribbon controller (or better: the Haken Continuum), there are many advantages over the TPX actually. But only with the TPX can you jump back and forth to such a number of very specific pitches so reliably. More significantly, though *this* video was essentially monophonic, this keyboard can achieve polyphonic precisely-tuned chords that a ribbon could never quite do. See my other videos to see what I mean.

[Guakingo]

Microtonal piano music just sounds badly out of tune, but with this thing you add individual microtonal notes here and there which makes this into a much more interesting musical statement. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

[nphony]

@Guakingo Thanks for the comment! Yeah, there are problems with limited microtonal piano. If one is restricted to only 12 pitches per octave, there isn't the flexibility to have contrast and dynamic tuning like with this keyboard. But some microtonal piano sounds good to me, although I know what you mean about some of it sounding odd and out of tune. Sometimes I like odd just for the oddity, but microtones can sound perfectly musical and acceptable in the right context.

[TheUnforgivent]

@nphony Well, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you very much

[sirvidia]

@nphony yeah, chordally it totally makes sense

[Hyronious]

It looks like lego.

[nphony]

@Raakim322 Thanks for the comment! I hope to get around to recording much more involved stuff in the near future...