MTS-ESP Tuning Tool by Oddsound and Aphex Twin

Their first priority seems to be to support softsynths - especially DAW plugins.

However, I did ask about testing with Moog Matriarch, since @blipson has been inquiring about that in relation to MTS. Kirn says he’s on it.

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You’re just trying to sell me on a Matriarch! Seriously, this is is a very timely find, so thanks for posting. I’ll definitely go through it with a fine-tooth comb, but I fear that very few plugins will support MTS sysex, which means that MTS-ESP is going to implement the pitch bend trick to microtune notes in real-time. That’s great, because there’s no way I’m going to go through the pain of calculating and verifying 310 frequency/pitch bend pairs for 10 octaves of 31-EDO. The big drawback is the pitch bend trick limits you to note-per-channel because the pitch bend quantity is different for every note. That reduces Omnisphere to 8-polyphonic monotimbre, but I’ll take it. I mean, there’s always the DAW with multiple instances.

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I would first test MTS-ESP itself with TX16Wx or the other plugins that supposedly support MTS-ESP directly. Just make sure MTS-ESP itself works.

Only after would I extend my testing to synths communicating through the MIDI client.

That’s just me.

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It will work with any mono synth using cc pitch end data. And supposedly any poly synth that supports MPE.

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Did you test it?

Sure the website claims it will work with those things but for someone who is thinking of buying a particular synth, it’s better to test it for real and not just buy it on faith.

I’ve used similar software (lil miss scale oven) which re-tunes via pitch bend (mono-synths) and this works in exactly the same way. It’s pretty straight forward and any synth which receives PB on the midi input will work. I’ve got MTS-ESP suite so will be trying it out with a few synths.

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Also any synth with MPE already implemented should work without any special integration. Of course they do say that there’s more the develops and manufactures can do to integrate the MTS-ESP directly into their products. BUT as long as PB Or MPE is available, then there is already something MTS-ESP can work with.

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Yesterday I sent in a LION patch to Plugin Alliance that adds in MTS-ESP and Apple Silicon support. Should be out in early May.

The MTS-ESP implementation is probably the easiest third-party library I’ve ever dealt with. It took less than fifteen minutes to add, and worked on the first compile. I’m pretty smitten with it. I spent way too much time hacking JUCE to get MPE and microtuning to play together nicely. On the plus side, they used LION in their demo video to show how nicely non-native MTS-ESP synths can interact with MTS-ESP, so that helped justify my time :laughing:

Anyway, I hope this shows up everywhere. I’ve been having a blast with it.

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Look forward to trying it out! :alien:

Hope @Elektron is listening!

Elektron,
Please implement this single line of code into our lovely hardware/overbridge.

I’ll give you a kiss if you do :slight_smile:

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For someone who’s always been interested in micro tuning - then spent one afternoon looking at Scalia and realised how out of their depth they are - do you get the sense that this will be a good way to get into making micro tonal music?

Is this your app? Sounds pretty good!

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Yes! Thank you. I’m very proud of it.

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Oli from ODDSound here. This is really awesome news, big thanks! LION is great fun, I’ve been tuning it with MPE and it works nicely but to have native MTS-ESP support will be perfect. Drop us an email when the update is live and we’ll make sure it is added to the list of MTS-ESP compatible synths on our site.

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The Moog documentation says that the Matriarch will accept all MTS SysEx formats, so it should work nicely with our MIDI Client plug-in, even for dynamic retuning with single note messages. There is a Matriarch preset included with it.

True there is little support for MTS SysEx in plug-ins, which is why we introduced MTS-ESP…it’s like a software counterpart to MTS SysEx. Our hope is that as time goes on more developers will implement it and to this end we’ve kept the implementation cost as low as possible. But for everything else we are limited to pitch bend retuning, be it mono or poly if possible. At least this can now be globally controlled though!

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MTS SysEx support in the A4 would be a great place to start…I would really love to see that.

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Do you require the user to set the effected plugin’s pitch bend range, or do you detect that yourself or rely on it being set to that plugin’s default? I’m asking because I normally set the pitch bend range to 1 semitone to make my algorithm work, but when I set Kontakt’s pitch bend range to 1 semitone (for example, for Brass Solo), the tuning is incorrect. If I leave Kontakt set at 2 semitones and cut my pitch bend in half, then the tunings are correct, so I suspect Kontakt’s pitch bend range setting isn’t exact enough for pitch bend retuning. Has anyoneused MTS-ESP with Kontakt?

Unfortunately we can’t detect a plug-in’s pitch bend range, it’s not really possible with any of the plug-in APIs, although would be nice! As a user you need to make sure the “Synth” pitch bend range in the MIDI Client matches the bend range in whatever you are retuning. You can set the range to whatever you like, just make sure it’s the same. If tuning sounds incorrect it may be because the bend range is not large enough to retune a note by the required amount. To counter this, set Retune Type to “Note+PB” in the MIDI Client, so that it uses a combination of note adjustment and pitch bend for retuning.

Kontak acoustic instrument samples’ pitch bend range defaults to 2 as far as I know. Can I ask you to do a quick experiment? Set a Kontakt instrument’s pitch bend range to 1, then see if MTS-ESP retunes it properly. If not, then that would verify that Kontakt’s “1 st” pitch bend range setting isn’t exactly 1 step.