slicedbread, on behalf of The Covert Operators, has released a free Windows utility that generates “endless harmonic oscillators” for Ableton Live’s Simpler and Sampler instruments. (Since this was a released, a Mac build has been made available, as well; see link below.) Even if you don’t intend to use the utility directly, pay attention – The Covert Ops already have a sample pack up full of oscillators, and you can bet the presence of this utility means more will come. (Even Robert Henke was impressed on the forums.)

Live 6 introduced the file format for “Ableton Meta Sounds.” Bjorn Vayner is currently breaking down how the format works, but the short upshot is that you can make oscillator sources that won’t alias for sound design in Simpler and Sampler. The AMS File Utility does more, too – export tunings (even microtuned stuff), and make oscillator variations. It’s sampling for people who like synthesis. In fact, not only is it fun to make additive synthesis-style oscillators dragging individual harmonics, but it’s a total breeze to change the offset and make equal-tempered stuff, negative scales, and other tunings.

Description on the forums:

AMS File Utility for Microtonal/Traditional Tunings

And from the very awesome Covert Operators site, some of the behind-the-scenes action, plus the Mac build (updated with additional links!):

Meta Files: Uncovering the .ams format, Part 1

Meta Files: Uncovering the .ams format, Part 2

Meta Files: Uncovering the .ams format, Part 3

Mac OS X Meta Application

Thanks for reminding us of this, Tony. I’m a bit behind on all this, but better late than never. Since I am lagging, has anyone made some AMS packs since this came out in September?

Don’t get too excited. Gibson Guitar is not, in fact, introducing a fully robotic guitar. Or a creepy robot doll that plays a guitar. Nor are they shipping you a handsome (male/female/your choice) robot assistant who will follow you around and tune your guitar for you. Too bad. But they are launching a robotic, self-tuning guitar on December 7. And most importantly, it comes in a limited-edition frost blue paint retro-robotic job, which even as a non-guitarist, I have to admit is super hot. So, what’s robotic about it? Its tuning system:

In addition to its automated tuning and alternate/open tuning functions, the Gibson Robot Guitar offers a unique Intonation function, which guides even the most tweak-phobic player through the simple steps of achieving perfect intonation on this revolutionary instrument. No tools or external tuners or other gadgets are needed other than a small screwdriver and the Robot Guitar’s own Master Control Knob (MCK). The guitar itself “talks you through” the entire process, resulting in a correctly intonated guitar in a fraction of the time it takes even a professional guitar tech to do the same job.

My favorite line was this, from the press release:

“Since the dawn of the instrument, musicians have come to accept the guitar’s imperfections and lack of tonal precision as necessary evils. Onstage and off, guitarists have fought to stay in tune. Every music lover and performer has had to suffer through the show—halting, mood-killing atonal droning of a loudly amped guitar being brought into tune.”

Or, erm, not brought into tune, as the case may be. (Jump!)

I read that initially as “every music lover … had to suffer through the show,” and the whole passage makes it sound like pretty much everybody just has to suffer guitars. Boy, am I ever a Keyboard player.

In all seriousness, the good news here is that this instrument really opens up the possibilities of open and alternative tunings, which make a terrific difference in sound even untrained ears may be aware of. And that’s not an “experimental” thing; it’s part of the history of the music. Gibson does a nice job of summarizing that on their page, and has an interview with the inventor, as well.

The connection to this site, aside from “robot” in the name — tuning is important, and it’s something I’d love to see soft synth makers make more accessible to lay people (hint: make it easier to adjust tuning in the interface, do some more interesting presets, and even think about controllers).

Robot Guitar Product Site with manual, demo videos, and background [Gibson Guitar]

No word yet on whether Van Halen will be endorsing this. Gibson: might want to send them one, just in case. (Hey, I had to get one cheap shot in.)

Pray that one day your onstage train wrecks will get this much analysis. Mine tend to involve only free produce — not always fresh, sadly.

Wilfred Fumbly says, just so you don’t have to bother him about it any more:

I took it off for a couple reasons. First, I’m pretty busy with work and found having to respond/answer/defend was taking up a lot of time and mental energy.

Secondly, I began to question my original theory. At the time, it seemed like a reasonably theory because the song isn’t exactly in C#… it’s close. So a sample rate screw up seemed a good explanation and the math seemed to work in its favour too. I began to doubt the theory though, as time went on and VH continued to play the song at other shows in the same weird key.

It’s possible that they simply adapted to a screwed up computer file and my theory was right all along. But there’s no way to know that. Apparently VH has played the song in C, C#, and D on various tours… but I didn’t know that at the time.

So, rather than mislead people into thinking I knew the answer for sure… I took the video response off.

Cuz I’m not sure anymore.

Or maybe the whole event is the result of a discontinuity in time, produced by the unnatural attempt to keep Van Halen’s career alive, as The Master suggests in comments.

What’s amazingly tiresome about this argument is the esoteric tweak-freakish strong-minded opinions toward one cause or another.
Here’s the bottom line. The mighty Van Halen is nothing but a dream, a dream best left remembered. To go out on tour in their current state, and with the current line-up, is a complete waste of time. Shame on them, and shame on anyone who promotes their ridiculous conceited behavior. I’m glad someone one was out of tune. Who cares if it was Eddie or the keyboard. They sucked, they sounded horrible, and people paid a LOT of money for it. Shame shame shame! If they all got on the same page way back in the day, they might have had a better chance of staying together as a band. If Eddie quit drinking and started smoking weed, or if David Lee Roth did the opposite, then they might still be together. You can’t have a pot head and a drunk competing with each other for control of a band like that. They both need to be on the same page chemically.

See? Everyone has a theory.

Thanks, Wilfred Fumbly. (video’s gone now … more in a moment)

So, the original theory holds: most likely a sample rate issue. Well, unless Van Halen is really old school, run their backing tracks on reel-to-reels, and had that set to the wrong speed. Sample rates it is.

More importantly, we’ve definitively proven Eddie is a “great guitar player,” which I know is what was really bothering everybody about this clip. He demonstrates this greatness with true vigor, by playing as loudly as possible for five minutes completely out of tune with the backing track and the vocals (which were matching the backing track) as if he’s completely deaf. If you had any doubts about what a true Guitar Hero is, now you know. (And yeah, unfortunately, I do think that really was his only choice. Guess the techs couldn’t get the clock rate set back to normality.)

Speaking of Guitar Hero / Rock Band: Activision / Harmonix, if you’re listening, I think you know what my request for an Easter Egg in your game would be.

Updated: The video is gone. So now we can not only speculate about what happened to Van Halen, but what happened to the video. Perhaps WilfredFumbly noticed that, while the keyboard part in Greensboro was pitched higher than the original album recording, so were other gigs on the tour. That means the guitar is far from absolved. And it lends new credence to my “Wormhole Theory.” Maybe Eddie’s guitar was temporarily replaced with one from the past, in which the song was in a different key, or even an alternate universe where this is in tune.

Okay. I got nothing.

My God … it’s full of keys!

While the black-and-white piano-style keyboard layout remains the standard, designers still look for ways of reinventing pitch in music controllers. Sometimes the aim is to make it easier to play harmonies (top) … and sometimes it’s 211 keys-per-octave microtonal mayhem.

First, at NAMM we see C-Thru Music’s new AXIS, the “world’s first harmonic table MIDI keyboard.” Despite outward appearances, all these extra keys are designed to make it easier to play. By placing thirds and fifths as a adjacent to one another, you don’t have to reach to find chords — you can mash your fingers together and still hit a perfect minor thirteenth chord. (That’s one Giant Step for ‘Trane, one tiny finger squash for you.) According to its creators, “even DJ’s can use it.” You be the judge.

C-Thru Music AXIS (thanks, Carl, Keith, and others!)

Of course, if you’re trying to terrify friends with wild looking keyboards, the C-Thru has nothing on the H-Pi instruments. 12 keys per octave? Try 211 keys per octave, 1,688 keys. The Tonal Plexus, after eight months in development, will ship in June 2007, starting at US$1292.

I could try to explain this, but it’s better to watch the videos. And if you ever fantasized about playing a Lego base plate, your time is now.

What’s interesting here is that, unlike continuously-pitched controllers like the Theremin or Continuum fingerboard, it’s possible to find exact instruments. And somewhere along the line, all diatonic scales — plus whole mess of other tunings — manage to fit in the space of a single octave.

Of course, I don’t imagine myself learning 211 notes to the octave (even if I’ve taught some keyboard skills classes where it seems like that’s what the students were playing). Fortunately, H-Pi has a lot of useful goodies for tuning nuts, including notation software and MIDI gadgets.

Most promising is The Tuning Box (TBX-1), which costs just US$350 and can retune any MIDI controller on-the-fly to any custom tuning. At that price, it might appeal to anyone interested in exploring tunings easily.

Thanks to Aaron Andrew Hunt for sharing his beautifully unusual work.

H-Pi Instruments

Not new, but the Continuum Fingerboard as I said goes the opposite direction — continuous expression, rather than a bunch of buttons/keys. See it in action in a recent GearWire video from NAMM:
The Haken Audio Continuum Fingerboard Video- WNAMM ‘07 [GearWire]

Lots more microtonal / alternative keyboard layouts: Mike sends this fantastic historical roundup, also via Aaron Hunt’s site at Eastern Illinois University. Stunning, comprehensive history of these instruments!

Yes, now not only will Jessica Simpson be able to sing in tune, she’ll be able to be tuned to an Indonesian pelog scale!

AutoTune, the ubiquitous and now pretty ridiculously powerful tuning software, has some major new improvements in AutoTune 5. Central to the upgrade is a graphical mode that lets you draw pitch envelopes over a representation of the detected pitch. Here’s where things start to get interesting: the developers at AutoTune have added pen tablet input, so you can hook up your Wacom tablet, polish off your drawing skills, and perform either subtle tweaks or expressive, experimental pitch changes to an audio source.

Microtonal and alternative guru Carl Lumma, a veteran of Keyboard Magazine, writes to point out that the upgrade now no longer limits you to conventional major and minor modes: 26 historical and microtonal scales are included in the new release. That’s great, but they don’t seem to support Scala tuning files, which would be even better. There’s also new sync-to-host support, so you could do some crazy beat-synced pitch distortion with this.

It’s too bad AutoTune isn’t a little more affordable, because it sounds like just the kind of software a lot of us would love to abuse. The adjustment speed and vibrato controls are all designed to be expressive and closely controlled, so I think there’s likely a wide range of sonic effects you could coax out of this very powerful software. Go find a friend with a plug-in-laden Pro Tools setup and ask if you can borrow it late at night.

Antares AutoTune 5 Preview [Antares, via]