J. Knapka has been hard at work developing abcsound. I have actually taken it for more than one test drive. However, today, I completed a small scale compositional project using it. Not bad for an alpha stage module!

Now I understand. Realtime MIDI has my full attention.

For once, this will be a short article. Below, I've posted four simple bass instruments. I've been generating samples to use in Renoise (which, by the way, is available for Linux); I wanted a set of simple, but powerful bass sounds -- completely clean, and hugging the 16 bit maximum.

The second instrument I've created for the Random Ambient collaboration uses pvanal and the opcode pvoc to resynthesize a heavy, single note drone from an original bagpipe sample.

Around nine months ago, I wrote a module called pcsets: Pitch Class Sets for Python. Since then, I've tried to improve it, but found it difficult to do so -- it seems like I actually got it right the first time. However, pcsets now has a derivative: I've adapted it to handle the base-13 Bohlen-Pierce scale.

I have revised my original Python converters for the Bohlen-Pierce scale. After reading more about the scale on The Bohlen-Pierce Site, I discovered there was already an existing tuning system standard.

In addition to my music on Jamendo, I'm also a member at ccMixter. A few weeks ago, I was excited to see some familiar names on ccMixter's front page -- notably the OLPC Berklee Sample Pool.

So there is already a connection between Csound and ccMixter! I'm about to build on that, by submitting some of my creations in a new collaborative project: Random Ambient

A few weeks ago, I found something amazing: the Bohlen-Pierce Scale. To simplify my life, I designed a pitch class converter to allow scorefile input in the form T.pc (tritave, dot, pitchclass). It can handle two forms of the scale, in equal temperament and just intonation. And just to make things a bit more interesting, I created a demo -- complete with an announcer ;-)

The BP Scale

One of the best uses I've found for Csound is experimenting with music in different tuning systems. About a year ago, I got into Pitch Class Sets (even writing a Python module called pcsets). Long before that point, however, I was into jazz, and the traditional chord-scale theory.

All three now collide.

(Continued from part 1, part 2.)

I decided to voice the melody using the vibes opcode. Here's where I met my first major problem ... and made a major discovery.