Tribalism #2
02 April 2011 Filed in: Music
Listen to Tribalism #2
This is a follow-up to Tribalism #1 because part of the material used this time had been recorded for the previous song and then split off.
This piece too features my voice. To stay in tune with Carlos Beta, the featured tuning system of this tune, I have had a little help from Melodyne Assistant!
Melodyne is not very well-suited for microtonal editing. It only has a handful of preset scales and does not read Scala files or any other tuning format.

...but, of course, it does retune notes as you can see on the picture below.
Look at the first “blob” in red, then look at the event list on the right. Because the voice doubles the flute I use the flute track as pitch reference. You see that the first note of the flute track is A#2.
Now the question is: what is the pitch assigned to MIDI note A#2 in Carlos Beta? The answer is given by LMSO when you save Carlos Beta in ASCII text format (as on the window shown below) and is B2 -27.628182 cents (if the anchor note is C3)!

Now, all you have to do is to tune the corresponding blob accordingly! You can see on the top left corner of the above picture that the pitch of that blob is B3 -27 cents (actually it is an octave higher than expected because of the Melodyne algorithm but it works anyway).
You can see that it is a rather tedious process to retune a microtonal melody with Melodyne so I have come to the following conclusion: it is best to record the best possible vocal performance and then fix only what is macroscopically wrong instead of recording some inaccurate vocal line hoping to fix everything later on. It may sounds like an obvious analysis but I had to experience it first hand to realize it.
I find the end result quite pleasing to my ear without too many sound artifacts.
The other melodic sounds (TuvanMandolin and PsychoMellotronFlute) come from Spectrasonics Omnisphere.
