User scales

[topherdavis]

Too bad, many of us want this feature. we will wait. I imagine you have lot to do!

They are many features many people are waiting of and i can only do things step by step. And i got to keep an eye on other developments as well.

+1 on this feature. 

Given the recent update, will scales make it into the nest release? Any sense of timing? 

I realize you will have your own dev roadmap, but perhaps a poll on high level feature requests to see which ones the community is more keen on would be helpful?

Did you use the scales through the tables yet?

I'm looking at the table scales right now and an Automator maybe to route through the scale? I'm just trying to test it with CV1 in to CV1 out.

(Also curious if you are planning on making it work like this or only for recording? If it can just work as a quantizer that means it can be used as a quad quant )

[mgd]

Hi Forum,

here's my take w/r to scales and user scales (which of course I also find a very desirable addition )

I would like if there will be the usual suspects that derive from the chromatic scale that we have (minor, major, pentatonic, etc. - such lists can be found in numerous places). Note entry should then be limited to a scale (also obvious). It becomes interesting when we come to transposing, possibly between scales.

So far so obvious.

I'd really like to see scales other then the ones being subsets of the chromatic scale, namely those that have more than 12 steps per octave (up to 53 seems to be what still does make sense musically). And there are scales that do not have an octave as part of them. Famous members of this family are Wendy Carlos alpha, beta and gamma scales.

The main difference between scales based on the chromatic scale and those with more steps per octave is exactly that: The number of equidistant steps per octave, i.e. the increment from note to note in cent differs between these scales. And that's exactly the same with Wendy Carlos's scales. They have a different number of cent per step.

Now for the graphical representation on screen of the more exotic scales:
The name of the scale should be shown in the right part of the window. That leaves 3 digits for the notes. The first digit would be the octave (0-A) and the next two digits the note number within the octave. For alpha/beta/gamma and similar scales the same pattern could be applied by defining a new octave starts, when a new note "passes" an octave.

Example:
In alpha note 15 is 30.5 cent below the octave and note 16 would be the first note of the next octave, e.g. both notes could be represented as 014 and 100 (note in the octave numbered zero
based) or 015 and 101 (note in the octave numbered one based).

While I'm at it and because it feels rather similar and related w/r to the result I also would like to see tunings as loadable properties. I think it is possible to have tunings by means of tables (correct?)
I would like to be able to create my own tunings, save them and of course load them into another project.

Tuning as of the above means offsets from chromatic tuning per note in cent (and millicent).

Thank you very much for reading thus far. I hope the above makes sense and is understandable. If in doubt please ask and I'm happy to elaborate.

Update:
Further thinking about this I realize scales do have an impact on chords. For scales that are reduced w/r to the chromatic scale this may or may not result in certain notes no longer part of a chord. For non chromatic scales chords may require a rework. And that kind of canonically leads to User Chords...

Update2:
I just learned that the NerdSEQ uses 12 bit DACs for the CV outputs (apparently a design decision made a long time ago). Unfortunately that reduces the NerdSEQ's usefulness for microtonal scales and tuning as well as exotic tunings (which of course don't even exist as of today). While that results in average tuning errors of about 3-4 cents (up to 7-8 cents in worst case), I still think that at least scales (even non chromatic and not octave bound ones) would be a valueable addition to the NerdSEQ.

Support for tunings seems to be a moot point though. I retract that feature request.

Kind regards,
Michael

[ural]

Update2:
I just learned that the NerdSEQ uses 12 bit DACs for the CV outputs (apparently a design decision made a long time ago). Unfortunately that reduces the NerdSEQ's usefulness for microtonal scales and tuning as well as exotic tunings 

are you sure? (micro)scale is pure voltage and cv out put is pure voltage. even now you can fine tune (out) each individual step of pattern. what is necessary - to implement save functioon of those "finetunings" as (micro)scales for sake of time.

[mgd]

Update2:
I just learned that the NerdSEQ uses 12 bit DACs for the CV outputs (apparently a design decision made a long time ago). Unfortunately that reduces the NerdSEQ's usefulness for microtonal scales and tuning as well as exotic tunings 

are you sure? (micro)scale is pure voltage and cv out put is pure voltage. even now you can fine tune (out) each individual step of pattern. what is necessary - to implement save functioon of those "finetunings" as (micro)scales for sake of time.

I am sure. Here is why:
All CV the NerdSEQ creates comes from the DACs. The number of possible voltages and their values is determined by the number of bits the DAC does convert. To illustrate this assume we'd have a 2 bit DAC that creates voltages between 0V and 1V. 2 bit means we have 4 possible values, e.g. 0V, 0.333V 0.666V and 1V. There are no other voltages this 2 bit DAC could create.

Now with a 12bit DAC we have 4096 possible voltages (say 4000 for simplicity) and the output range spans 10V. Therefor we have 400 steps to cover 1V or about 2.5mV per step on average (assuming the DAC is perfectly linear which most DACs aren't). 2.5mV are pretty exactly 3 cents (1 cent is 0.83333mV).

Another way to come to this is here:
1V change equals 1 Octave change in tone and that is also 1200 cent. As outlined above we 400 possible values that we can represent which equally distributed means 1 CV value every 3 cent.

As Thomas remarked elsewhere in this thread and I think also in the manual:
Not all possible 4096 values are supported but "only" a bit less than 4000. That means that with perfect DACs we have a distance between possible neighbouring CVs of 3-4 cents. And this means that for a given tuning the worst case w/r to tuning error is somewhere between 7-8 cent (a bit less than twice the average distance).

The average error is smaller which makes it suiteable for a lot of scales. But w/r to microtuning there are limits as described above.

Just for completeness sake:
16 bit DACs would add another theoretical 16 values per (current) step and thus reduce the distance between neighbouring voltages to something like 0.2 cent. However it is my understanding that currently the internal representation of notes in NerdSEQ could not deal with that additional precision and and change may or may not be practically impossible within the current NerdSEQ HW (memory constraints).

Kind regards,
Michael

[XORadmin]

Actually even having an additional note between C and C# would be microtuning already.
No you can't have 1 cent precision microtuning, but what Michael says something around 3-4 cent is realistic. And practically it is very difficult to hear any difference between the 2 next to each other values (lets say 4 cent). Even more if they are not next to each other anymore.
What comes in there additionally is linearity of oscillators, cable lengths and it's resistance caused by that, jack resistances. perfect calibration of both...etc.
So basically a hard job to have everything perfect (even with 16 bit DAC) and once you have everything perfect, it is not in tune anymore.

Getting back to NerdSEQ scaling functionality:
With the things mentioned already about my ideas. The usual suspects for scaling will be there, also very few user scales including a microtuning for each note (this then within the 3-4 cent possibilities.). This is the best I can do with the hardware platform.
While the standard scales will cover 99.x percent of the users, the microtuning for individual notes is only for a hand full of people. Still I plan to include this.
All the exotic stuff like with Alpha notes or different substeps in octaves seems to me a total overkill, nice for a musical study, but time intensive to implement in the current situation and I guess if anyone would use it at all.

[ural]

While the standard scales will cover 99.x percent of the users, the microtuning for individual notes is only for a hand full of people. Still I plan to include this.

sometimes you can take just one or two notes from standard tuning and tune them "micro" up or down - it already changes overall feeling of sequence.

[BillyAB]

Just adding my perspective as a new nerdseq user: it would be useful to be able to set scales non-destructively on a per pattern basis (using patches). This way you could go crazy with tables and still stay in key. It's important that it's non-destructive, too. This way you could copy a pattern, then change the scale to create a variation with a key change.

---

Also, at the beginning of a composition, it is really nice to be able to audition different scales quickly to see which one creates the best riff. This is another reason for non-destructive scaling.

[XORadmin]

Just adding my perspective as a new nerdseq user: it would be useful to be able to set scales non-destructively on a per pattern basis (using patches). This way you could go crazy with tables and still stay in key. It's important that it's non-destructive, too. This way you could copy a pattern, then change the scale to create a variation with a key change.

---

Also, at the beginning of a composition, it is really nice to be able to audition different scales quickly to see which one creates the best riff. This is another reason for non-destructive scaling.

There is already scaling for the tables. You can clone a table so it is non-destructive.
But on top of that there is the plan for the scaling functionality proposed in this thread.

[Dries]

Apologies for dusting this off but I was wondering if there is any news one this? I would really like some scales
(Or i might have missed it in the manual)

[mgd]

Apologies for dusting this off but I was wondering if there is any news one this? I would really like some scales
(Or i might have missed it in the manual)

There is some (limited) means to use scales by way of tables. But that's currently limited to the 6 local tracks - not sure about tracks 7&8.

Kind regards,
Michael