Wide Gamma 1
01 July 2013 Filed in: Alternate
controllers | Tuning
Theory
Back to Carlos Gamma, the tuning system I had used for more than one year from the end of 2009 to the beginning of 2011 when my album “Gammatar” was released.
Carlos Gamma was devised by Wendy Carlos.
It is a non-octave tuning system dividing interval 3:2 into 20 equal steps of 35.098 cents each (other variants exist but that is the one I use).
The only way to manage it is using an isomorphic keyboard like my Opal Chameleon (unless you use modes of it with a smaller selection of pitches assigned to an Halberstadt keyboard).
My Chameleon has 192 buttons but there are only 128 MIDI notes so I could only use two thirds of my keyboard as you can see on my old blog articles (this one for example, the not labelled keys are outside the MIDI range).
In the meantime, the amazing X.J.Scott has devised a way to deal with this issue, in order to make all 192 Chameleon’s keys playable with Carlos Gamma. The title of this article refers to this wider range of pitches available to me now. Previously, from top to bottom notes, there was a range of 4457.4 cents (127 steps * 35.098 cents each), now the range is 6528.2 cents (186 steps * 35.098 cents each).
In other words we go from 3.71 to 5.44 octaves range!
The actual available pitches on my Chameleon are 183 because 9 keys are doubled and 3 are missing due to the particular shape of the keyboard (see next chapters).
This breakthrough made me want to start all over again with Carlos Gamma.
This ingenious solution requires two computer applications by X.J.Scott: Disarray and LMSO.
The idea is to use more than one MIDI channel to cover the entire range of a 192 key instrument like my Chameleon.
Disarray does the trick!
The patches that have to go with this layout must be retuned accordingly and LMSO does it flawlessly! Without him I would be musically dead!
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