Up until my last minute entry in the amazing science lab experiment, I hadn’t used the MD too extensively to create anything melodic. For some reason, the lab took me in that direction completely. It was very fun and very educational! But also a bit frustrating. Although I was able to get my bass and synth lines to play together (mostly) in tune, the whole song is many cents off from A440. But that made sense to me - I was working with a sample, tweaking it into odd places with RTIM that had long since lost their association with specific tuning…
So I just experimented a bit more with the GND>SN, TRX, and EFM machines which can be manipulated into specific pitches. I’ve downloaded the pitch chart from the files section here. But I found that these aren’t perfect either. I’m guessing that this is just a limitation of the machine? Again fun to play with and try to work around, but not ideal for creating compositions that will play with other instruments.
My question: Is there something in the design of the AR that deals with this? Can samples and “machines” be tweaked into pitches that agree with A440?
I’ve used the MD for about 6 months with the goal of creating melodic elements to complement the more straightforward percussion and the results are a bit of a mixed bag. It’s totally possible to tune machines to act as melodic parts but it takes quite a bit of time and a good ear, and even then many of my attempts turned out frustrating or slightly off.
Like you, my greatest success has been with sampling. I’ve been capturing all kinds of external sounds and tweaking them to create droning sounds that are somewhat melodic but don’t rely on sticking to an exact pitch if you know what I mean. Now that I have a MnM to complement my MD, I think I’m going to have the MD stick mostly to percussion and samples and let the MnM handle the proper melodic parts.
I have much fun putting single cycle wavs into my machinedrum.
which I pitch in advance in my daw… so every cycle that goes in… is a C
it can be C8 or C4. or something in the middle… but always a C.
but once its in my machinedrum… I just let go of the idea that it has to be pitch-perfect… it just has to sound good… if I had to add a tuner to my setup to be accurate and exact, I would probably get so frustrated, that I wouldn’t do it at all…
This limitation led to me attaching an external multitimbral synth, sequenced by the MD’s MIDI machines. I personally have trouble coming up with more than 4 or 5 parts to a groove anyway, so I’m using 8 MIDI tracks (2 for each part on the synth) + 2 input tracks to incorporate the synth.
hmm, not sure what to tell you. i’ve created melodic lines for years using the trx and efm machines that appear in gweep’s pitch chart and then played them along with other synths without any tuning problems. of course i usually use a few favorite machines for this purpose and may have missed spots with errors. could you post with some specifics?
i also find 1-cycle waves are good source material. they’re especially good for basslines when properly filtered and can give great results if you resample them to create richer sounds.
Thanks to everyone for the replies. Good to see there’s still some activity going on in the forum for the good ole MD !
Agreed that precise pitch is not always called for, indeed sometimes warbly and off is just what you need. But I’m blessed/cursed with a crazy ear for pitch, and something like a bassline sometimes just has to be right or I can’t listen to it very long. Like I said in the my post, I never really delved to far at all into melodic lines on the MD until the Science Lab. And that got me thinking about the limitations.
But thanks to Dubathonic for those great links! And you led me to the solution which I can’t believe I didn’t previously consider - an LFO on pitch in “hold” mode with the speed set to 0. This really helps to fine tune. I started by checking Previewlounge’s formula for getting a “B” out of the GND>SN machine, but even so it was 22 cents flat (I use the peterson strobe app on my iphone for reference). But with an LFO on the pitch with a depth of 1, it comes in at 2.2 cents flat - that I can deal with!!!
Tedious, and no, not all the notes in a scale are available but hey - that’s the quirk of the MD we know and love.
I haven’t had time with the MD recently and haven’t gone back to check which pitches were off according to the chart, but it was generally this sort of thing - 15 - 25 cents off here and there. But they can be fine tuned by LFO. Of course this will require P-locks as it’ll likely be a different LFO depth required to tune as the Pitch parameter changes. But…that’s part of the fun?
Still, I must have an AR, A4 or Octatrack. or all 3. Right.
!