 Hello, I'll slay the sync here. Microtonal music is so hot right now, or at least it was in 2019, perhaps it's passé now, but I'm going to talk about it in this video anyway. I'm going to very briefly describe what I mean by microtonal in a moment, but I'll say upfront that if you want to get a more in-depth discussion and more musical examples, then I recommend heading over to Adam Neely's channel where he's done a bunch of really fantastic videos on the subject. I'll link to some in the video's description. But as a primer, in Western music there's this fairly universal construct called an octave. If you take a note with a fundamental frequency and then double that frequency, you get an octave. So for example, if you take concert pitch A with its fundamental at 440 Hz and then you play a note at 880 Hz, that's an A octave above. In Western music, we take the space between a note and the octave above it and split it 12 times, giving us 12 notes in each octave, a 12 tone musical system. The way that we usually split up the octave is based on a set of ratios defined as equal temperament. Equal temperament is a kind of musical mathematical trick that results in a set of notes that sound pretty pleasant or consonant no matter what key or scale you play in, certainly good enough for jazz. There are many other tuning systems that, if you make the promise not to change the scale or key, will actually sound sweeter than equal temperament, but can sound dissonant if you modulate away from it. Equal temperament then is a compromise, but it's probably one worth making if you want lots of instruments to sound good together no matter what music they're playing. Microtonality asks and answers the question, what happens if I split up the notes differently? What if I stick with a 12 tone scale but change the way the notes are split up? What if I stick with the concept of an octave but split it 5 ways or 13 ways or 25 ways and so on? What if I ignore the idea of an octave and define a different fundamental interval? This can lead to a whole new world of musical colours, sometimes beautiful, sometimes challenging but charged with musical emotions previously unavailable to you and sometimes just plain ugly, but perhaps it's ugly that you're needing your music sometimes. There are a range of synths available today that allow you to switch between pre-defined or even import your own microtonal scales. Most notably at the more affordable end of the market, Korg caters to microtonal enthusiasts very nicely with the monologue mini-log and actually even the Vulcan modular which allows for microtunings which is very cool. At the time of recording the microfreak does not allow you to formally make use of microtunings but that doesn't mean that you can't explore microtonality and in this video I'm going to explore some of the options available to us as I go hunting for new musical flavours. Okay here is a basic non-microtonal patch, it's based on the harmonic oscillator. Those of you who are familiar with the microfreak may already be anticipating that we are going to be heading into the mod matrix in order to do something. So on the left hand side of the mod matrix we have the pitch destination and we have our various different sources down the side here. Now of course the thing that we'd usually do with the pitch would be to apply just a little bit of pitch modulation to get off vibrato which is lovely obviously but that's not why we're going today. So for my first suggestion what we're going to do is we're going to head down to the next row which is pressure. So if I apply some modulation and I'll put in a value of one at the moment with the patch based off and initialised patch what's going to happen now is as I apply pressure you can hear that I can get some pitch bend. Let me make it a little bit more obvious. So as I put more of my finger down I get a pitch bend. Now the neat thing of course on the microfreak is that this pressure is actually polyphonic so I can bend one note sharp while leaving the other one in place. So with pressure as our modulation source having a value of two from modulation amount will give us a semitones bend which is great if you want to do these sorts of bends like this but that's not actually the way I'm going to approach this. There's nothing wrong with approaching it this way. I'd probably move the value down to one so we have a quarter tone rather I should say and with careful playing you could slide into sort of half sharp tones but you will always get that gliding thing happening. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to head into the utility menu I'm going to go to preset and I'm going to scroll down until I get to pressure mode here. So pressure mode at the moment will be set to after touch which is what we're getting at the moment with our polyphonic after touch there. What I'm going to set it to instead is velocity. So that means now what I do afterwards is going to make no difference but how I play the note itself does. So we can do by playing carefully we can do these sort of half resolution things like you probably have to be a better keyboardist than me. Now that's going to get trickier as you use more than two fingers I suspect but it might get really interesting if we move to a way of sequencing the velocity. Okay so I've just gone and got my KeyStep Pro but everything I'm going to show you here you could happily do in the door really really easily. You could also do this on any other controller that's going to allow you note by note control of velocity. So basically got the patch from before just made it a little bit more mellow for reasons that will become clear I've also added reverb on. The other thing I've done with this patch is I've set the pressure or rather velocity to pitch to two in the mod matrix which means when I press it very lightly we get the real note and when I press it with as much of my finger on as possible we get a semi tone up. So what I've done the KeyStep here if we go into the step edit here when we look at this first chord here we can see that we've got these notes that are lit up on it and if I go into each of those notes we'll see that the velocity for each of those notes is set to zero that's actually zero doesn't look like it but it is and as I go into other steps and take a look at the velocity for the various notes in the step you'll see that actually I've got them set to different velocities so what that means I think this one's probably a good example here step six all of the steps in this one you probably can't see it because it's in the shadow of the knob but the velocity for each of these is set to 64 which is the center point which means in terms of our routing on the on the microfreak that means that we're going to be up a quarter tone so it allows us to get these really dreamy kind of feelings so this first step is in concert pitch this is about a quarter flat half flat that's half sharp I think that's back in concert pitch as is that and then that's just slightly sharp I think we're at half sharp and this is something that I had a nearly spoke about in one of his videos about microtonal stuff for kind of lo-fi feelings and that is that if you alternate between your micro tunings between say concert pitch and half sharp it doesn't feel anywhere near as jarring it still sounds dreamy and sort of uncertain but it's still kind of working and of course if you have a door or a control which allows you per note velocity you know you can tweak one note within a chord for example to be slightly sharp or slightly flat by using the velocity and any synth that allows a matrix mapping between the velocity and the pitch of a note you can do this on this is a trick that will work on a lot of different synths whether or not they support microtonality at all okay let's take a look at another approach this one I have to say is probably my favorite so I've got a little carpalus strung patch set up here which is nice but particularly especially going on there but you know the carpalus strung algorithm always sounds good now if we think about the way that the internal modulation matrix is wired on the microfig there's probably one source of modulation that we don't really think about because it seems so sort of intrinsic to the way that we play the keyboard and that is that the keyboard is a modulation source for the pitch so when I play one key up it's going to modulate our pitch by a semitone at a time right so there is actually a modulation source implicit in the keyboard and what's really interesting about the microfreak is that modulation source is actually represented on this final row here where it says key up now the place that you would usually take this I suspect is with your cutoff to make it brighter at the top and darker at the bottom and that's a perfectly adjustment way of using it the old filter tracking keyboard tracking is a classic and for good reason but as we've already seen one of our destinations is indeed the pitch so what happens when we apply a modulation amount to our keyboard against the pitch so if I just hold these two notes down here so that they drone essentially what's going to happen when we change the modulation amount away from zero if we go negative it's going to bring those notes closer together and if we go positive it's going to spread them apart without any modulation applied that's an octave so by spreading or compressing these these notes we're going to get microtonal intervals across our keyboard and it's basically going to throw our keyboard into a non-standard layout if you like I've found this to be quite an interesting way to approach the instrument what I usually do there's probably a scientific way of doing this to work out precise modulation amounts but the way I usually approach is I play an interval for example a minus seventh there and then as we change the modulation amount I go looking for points at which that works again and then I explore what I have so we've got those notes there kind of work with some interesting clashes you kind of got half half or other quarter note happening there and you get these interesting textures you might need to explore a little bit because something's going to sound just bad and of course if you find intervals that you'd like you want to make them a little bit more playable we can of course adjust the layout a little bit you find some of these things which are quite beautiful still line up quite nicely there starts to get that little bit of an ease properly discorded try in different registers because of the way that it's going to spread it things are going to be more extreme at either end of the octave range as well and you are going to essentially have to relearn the keyboard a little bit that's nice in a kind of ugly way and of course we could think about also applying pressure as a source to our to our pitch as well so that we have the opportunity to bend things into tune if we need of course you would never find some of these intervals across the keyboard normally because of course they don't exist and that's kind of exciting to me let's try a different interval that's a expand rather than compressed so maybe let's go for being able to bend that note sharp that's quite useful and you can find all of these textures that simply not be available otherwise of course you're probably not going to be sat quite nicely on the root of your of your other instruments so you're probably going to be out of tune even at the root so you might want to go into preset here and sorry not in preset does it you may want to go into master tuning and look at the sent offsets to push whatever you choose to be your roots towards what you're actually playing in or not you know because sometimes that might be fun as well the other thing that is really quite exciting sometimes is to make use of the chord function so if we hold on yes so i think the other place where this sort of expansion compression of the keyboard works really well is sort of in your sort of asset world where you have a baseline and you know baselines get stale when they're actually playing normal notes so let's see what happens if we make this a bit more nasty again you may want to go into your utilities into master tuning and find where your root note now lives i think this is quite a cool way of finding evil sounding baselines they don't live within normal scales that top note is kind of like a half sharp thing going on yeah three kind of inching now throwing some spice the glide random it's fun so anyway i hope you enjoyed that and had fun in our little excursion through micro tonality if you did then make sure you give the video a thumbs up and make sure that you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun and weirdness as always thank you so much for joining me until next time take care bye