Transnotating Carlos Alpha
26 September 2011 Filed in: Alternate
controllers | Tuning
Theory
Third episode of the transnotating saga
The first two episodes can be found here: Transnotating Carlos Gamma, The Dawn of Beta
The methodology is still the one initially developed for transnotating Carlos Gamma, adapted to Carlos Alpha. Of course, the larger the step size of the scale to be transnotated, the simpler the process.
You can read about the note layout I have created to play Carlos Alpha and 15ED2 with my Chameleon here.
Twelve out of fifteen notes (natural and sharp notes) of each (pseudo) octave can be directly transnotated using a “transformer” object of Logic Pro’s Environment (see the “TransNotateMap” object on the picture below).
On this example I am playing a key, on the Chameleon, that Disarray (an utility by X.J.Scott) maps to MIDI note C3 (the real MIDI output of the Chameleon would be G#2).

C3 (MIDI note 60, on channel 1) is mapped, only for notation purposes, to E2 (MIDI note 52, on channel 16). See below.

Why is that? Because the note layout I chose for my Chameleon makes it a transposing instrument.
Changing the MIDI channel from 1 to 16 makes it simple to identify notes sent to a sound source from those only used for notation purposes.
Let’s see what happens when one of the three remaining notes (flat notes) of each (pseudo) octave is played:
On the example below I am playing the key that on the Chameleon is labelled Eb2, that Disarray maps to MIDI note B2 and that LMSO retunes (see “from LMSO IAC 1” ) to a note that is 77.995 cents below E2 (the note of the previous example).
The problem with flat notes is that there is no way to automatically transnotate them (because Logic Pro’s maps only support the usual 12 notes), so, how do I solve the problem? Manually!

You can see, from the picture below, that I map MIDI note 59 (B2) to MIDI note 5 (F-2) because I do not use that range of MIDI notes other than for notation purposes.

Below you can see the seventeen flat notes of my Carlos Alpha note layout so, for example, when I see a F-2 note I know that I have to manually move it to Eb2.

Of course I only need to go through this troublesome process if I want to notate my music in Carlos Alpha with standard notation otherwise I can simply forget about it!