My First Microtonal Piece!

Share and discuss your LMMS music projects here, and see what people think!
I ended up having to record my on board sound with pavucontrol, but I finally got it up! Thanks for your help musikbear!

https://youtu.be/HZZZP-rqdNw
Awesome! I think microtonal music is very interesting and your piece is well composed. I guess the instrumentation could be more interesting (and the art higher res), but I still really like it, it's relaxing :D. What does "recording on board sound" mean? How did you compose the music? I started working on a microtonal piece myself in LMMS by using parallel tracks with one of them detuned a quarter of a tone, but it was very tedious trying to coordinate chords between two piano rolls, I wish there was a way to adjust the tone amount in the piano roll itself (unless I'm missing something and there is a way).
Rakso wrote:
Fri Mar 01, 2019 1:31 am
What does "recording on board sound" mean?
Basically LMMS wasn't able to export my microtonal data so I had to literally record my computer's internal audio using PulseAudio and audacity while playing the project. ZynAddSubFX lets you modify the keyboard scales in any way that you want, but any time you close out of the GUI it forgets everything so I couldn't even use more than one instrument. I think it would be really hard to compose the way you did it, but at least it's possible to export projects and use multiple instruments. I'd like to hear what you came up with.
Nice work! I like it. Those occasional tiny intervals add a lot of spice. I'm curious where you got that scale. Looks like an odd mix of JI and 12EDO intervals.

I don't know if you saw my reply on your other thread, but for using ZASF in LMMS, definitely Carla Rack is the way to go - at least for now.

fyi I've done several microtonal pieces in LMMS. Here's the most recent (in 13EDO):
https://soundcloud.com/sirreel/pseudopolis

A few others are also there on soundcloud, and I've got a bunch of half-finished stuff I need to finalize and get out there...
fatraccoons wrote:
Fri Mar 01, 2019 5:28 am
Rakso wrote:
Fri Mar 01, 2019 1:31 am
What does "recording on board sound" mean?
Basically LMMS wasn't able to export my microtonal data so I had to literally record my computer's internal audio using PulseAudio and audacity while playing the project. ZynAddSubFX lets you modify the keyboard scales in any way that you want, but any time you close out of the GUI it forgets everything so I couldn't even use more than one instrument. I think it would be really hard to compose the way you did it, but at least it's possible to export projects and use multiple instruments. I'd like to hear what you came up with.
Cool ! I've got the work in progress (LMMS native project file) here https://lmms.io/lsp/?action=show&file=14682. I don't know if my chords sound too weird I think I've gotten desensitized to weird chords at this point lol. Your microtonal scale is much more sophisticated than mine, I'm just using quarter tones. (edit: fixed link)
Rakso wrote:
Mon Mar 04, 2019 1:38 pm
fatraccoons wrote:
Fri Mar 01, 2019 5:28 am
Rakso wrote:
Fri Mar 01, 2019 1:31 am
What does "recording on board sound" mean?
Basically LMMS wasn't able to export my microtonal data so I had to literally record my computer's internal audio using PulseAudio and audacity while playing the project. ZynAddSubFX lets you modify the keyboard scales in any way that you want, but any time you close out of the GUI it forgets everything so I couldn't even use more than one instrument. I think it would be really hard to compose the way you did it, but at least it's possible to export projects and use multiple instruments. I'd like to hear what you came up with.
Cool ! I've got the work in progress (LMMS native project file) here https://lmms.io/lsp/?action=show&file=14682. I don't know if my chords sound too weird I think I've gotten desensitized to weird chords at this point lol. Your microtonal scale is much more sophisticated than mine, I'm just using quarter tones. (edit: fixed link)
I really like it up until when the saw comes in, the quarter tones really add a haunting beauty to it. You've inspired me to look more into the 24 tone scale, Arabic music is very dear to my heart and your song is definitely reminiscent.

I think it's really hard to do harmonies with the 24 tone scale, most of the Arabic music I know either does European harmonies or is just monophonic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVlgMEFu1PI
This song is a pretty popular meme from a while ago and I don't think there are literally any harmonies or polyphony whatsoever. I actually heard this being played at a university event so this style is pretty popular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzW05lhEPKs
This song is old old and you can see the instruments mostly follow the melody and the drums provide most of the backing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm9arbu2WQI
They also use the pitch shifting wheel a lot. This song is really cool because it's a party song with a lot of obvious microtonal basically solo keyboard, but still barely if any harmonies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsN0EVk ... x=126&t=0s
This song I think actually does have microtonal harmonies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d2cJc ... ex=70&t=0s
With solo oud pieces you can see them using a drone technique some of the time

Sorry for piling on all the links, I just really like Arabic music and I think it's a good guide for how people have been using "microtonal" scales for hundreds of years in a popular setting that's still applicable today.
18musicians wrote:
Mon Mar 04, 2019 12:25 am
Nice work! I like it. Those occasional tiny intervals add a lot of spice. I'm curious where you got that scale. Looks like an odd mix of JI and 12EDO intervals.

I don't know if you saw my reply on your other thread, but for using ZASF in LMMS, definitely Carla Rack is the way to go - at least for now.

fyi I've done several microtonal pieces in LMMS. Here's the most recent (in 13EDO):
https://soundcloud.com/sirreel/pseudopolis

A few others are also there on soundcloud, and I've got a bunch of half-finished stuff I need to finalize and get out there...

I pulled some ratios from some xenharmonic website, it called it a pygmy scale whatever that means. The other notes are just from 12 TET. I've been mostly sticking with adding a little "spice" to the regular scale, it's really hard departing from that.

I really like that song, am I right in thinking it's an odd time as well? You guys make me want to step my game up :D

I've been trying to implement Carla, for some reason it keeps crashing on my macOS and on Linux I'm having trouble figuring out how to install it. I'm still doing songs in LMMS, I posted another one recently based on the harmonic series but ZynAddSubFX does really glitchy things where it'll put notes randomly in descending order or repeat notes in places you don't expect.
Yeah, that track is in 14/8 meter. A lot of the underlying bass line you can think of as 3+3+3+3+2.

I meant to mention before... I've been using KxStudio for awhile. With the repo packages it was fairly easy to get LMMS+Carla+ZASF set up the way I needed. But for other distros/OS, who knows...

Also if you can get external plugins working, you might check out AMSynth which also can be retuned with scala files.
https://amsynth.github.io/
fatraccoons wrote: Sorry for piling on all the links, I just really like Arabic music and I think it's a good guide for how people have been using "microtonal" scales for hundreds of years in a popular setting that's still applicable today.
Thanks for the links fatracoons! I added the first one to my spotify playlist, you seem to know a lot about arabic music :D. Indeed I find arabic music (and Indian as well for that matter) very interesting partly because of the scales they use.
18musicians wrote: Yeah, that track is in 14/8 meter. A lot of the underlying bass line you can think of as 3+3+3+3+2.

I meant to mention before... I've been using KxStudio for awhile. With the repo packages it was fairly easy to get LMMS+Carla+ZASF set up the way I needed. But for other distros/OS, who knows...

Also if you can get external plugins working, you might check out AMSynth which also can be retuned with scala files.
https://amsynth.github.io/
And 18musicians, thanks for the tips with how to make microtonal music (and you got some cool microtonal stuff)! I was able to get Carla rack and Zynfusion (basically ZASF) installed and working seamlessly on my Linux setup. Only thing is, I couldn't figure out the installation instructions of Scala, but I think I'll make a python script to generate Scala files since the file format is so simple.

Do you know of any free samplers or something that work on Linux and Carla rack that support microtonal tuning? It would be cool to be able to not be limited to only ZASF or other synthesizers.
18musicians wrote:
Tue Mar 05, 2019 3:56 am
Yeah, that track is in 14/8 meter. A lot of the underlying bass line you can think of as 3+3+3+3+2.

I meant to mention before... I've been using KxStudio for awhile. With the repo packages it was fairly easy to get LMMS+Carla+ZASF set up the way I needed. But for other distros/OS, who knows...

Also if you can get external plugins working, you might check out AMSynth which also can be retuned with scala files.
https://amsynth.github.io/
I'm actually having a lot of trouble getting Carla set up on my LMMS system