Delta Gamma Blues...
... or How to retune MOTU Ethno2 sounds without having to deal with Scala files!
Listen to Delta Gamma Blues
(a new version of Delta Gamma Blues, with a new lead sound, is featured on my Gammatar album)
I recently upgraded to MOTU Ethno2
I discovered a bug that prevents user tunings to be loaded into the program. MOTU is working on it and there is already an available workaround: instead of saving a user tuning to the UserTuning folder, you can drag and drop a Scala file to Ethno’s main page into the “Tuning” field.
I think Scala is not particularly user-friendly, at least for a Mac user. I had Scala installed on a previous machine, tried to learn it but gave up when I found a much better application well worth the time spent learning it: LMSO.
LMSO’s users can use another way to retune Ethno’s sounds (and those of version 1 too). The above mentioned song is the proof!

Click on the picture above to watch this short movie. That’s the start of Delta Gamma Blues.
The movie shows a portion of Ethno’s main page. I am using 3 different sounds. The selected sounds is “Harmonica 1” and you can see that I am not using any alternative tuning system (from within Ethno) but what you hear is certainly not 12tET (you can also notice that polyphony is set to 1 note). So?

Midi data from my master keyboard (port 5 of midi interface) go to Logic Pro. On Logic’s Arrange page I set 3 tracks called “to LMSO In” 1, 2 and 3 sending data on midi channels 1, 2 and 3 to LMSO.


Data of each track get separately retuned and sent back to Logic’s “Ethno2” instrument through IAC (Inter Application Communication protocol).
You can see, on Logic’ Environment page, cables connecting “From LMSO IAC” 1, 2 and 3 to Ethno2 (btw the Ethno2 icon you see on that page is only an “alias”, the original is on the mixer page).
That’s it!
Once you get used to this kind of procedure it is very fast to set up.
The advantage of this technique is having access to dynamic retuning techniques like “Dynamic Modulation”.
The disadvantage is having to deal with 2 applications at the same time.
The tuning system used for this song is a mode of Carlos Gamma using 12 out of the 20 equal divisions of ratio 3:2.
So, it is a dodecatonic, nonoctave scale repeating every 701.955 cents.
Check out also Version 2 of this song
P. R. commented:
Loved it. Had me holding the hand rails to make sure I was still standing upright.