Sunday Synth Jam: This video captures some more experimental synth jamming, using the free microtonal iPad app Mugician (App Store link).
Mugician is a microtonal-capable distortion synthesizer, designed for experienced guitarists.
Note: While Mugician is free, developer Robert Fielding practically dares you to use, saying “Mugician is hard to play!”
Do you think the iPad, and other touchscreen computing devices, can make microtonal music mainstream?
via rrr00bb
Why do you ask us such easy questions? No. The iPad won't make microtonal music mainstream. 🙂
They're only easy because Synthtopia readers are so brilliant.
No it won't. If people wanted to hear microtonal music it would already be mainstream.
Microtonal music, making it. Turns you more into a mathematician than musician. I should know having been into it for a number of years until I finally decided to give up on it. I refretted a guitar to 16 notes per octave but that was too difficult to make somewhat normal music with. A fretless guitar is about as far as I would go these days. And doing microtonal music with keyboards, you almost need a whole new keyboard to do it with. Either that or tape over every key so you know exactly what notes you are using.
Yes! Did you know that iPads can also cure cancer, relieve chronic back pain, make you more attractive to the opposite sex, whiten your teeth and make your breath minty fresh!
micro-tonal could be mainstream if more people would make it… not in a collegiate setting, but for the masses…
the majority of people brave enough to do it (and experimental electronic musicians) are seen as crackpots… for being HEROES… what these "noise-makers" are doing is the trial and error required to create a foundation for new musical theories…
their hard work and misunderstood music will eventually trickle down to popular music in a diluted fashion, the same way the industrialists in Italy influenced the concept of organized noise, silver apples of the moon influenced electronica, pierre henry influenced sampling….
The fact that Mugician is free, and that people ARE playing with it… this is a good sign… I love their App, and have been using it to accompany my tabla playing… microtonal music is awesome…. just more colors to paint with.
"Microtonal music, making it. Turns you more into a mathematician than musician."
I'm sure those musicians in the Middle East, China, Indonesia and India (as well as those eastern European choirs) would heartily disagree with that quote. Microtonal music has been around for a long time, just not so much in the vocabulary of Western music.
Well, I don't understand it (partly because I can't read grey text on a bright white background), but I like what I hear.
i say it because everything about a multitouch computer instrument drives you to fretlessness. the academic debates about how many frets is strange to me. if you just pick up a fretless instrument and practice without anything else, you will naturally bend notes to make beating go away – to create the shortest standing wave. a fretted guitar at high distortion reveals that minor third is too narrow, and major third too wide…a fourth slightly too wide, etc. you dont need more than ears to discover it. the temperments exist for reasons having nothing to do with sound…in spite of it actually. playing on a touch computer means that the temperment rules can follow sound physics rather than numerology,mechanical constraints, and habits.
🙂 exactly. this is that new keyboard. this keyboard layout (i am not the only one using it, and i wont be the last) is at a middle ground between piano and guitar skills, while having no intonation preference imposed by the layout. its crazy that most synths are not designed to match most musicians….guitarists.
I’d love to see an iOS app that works like Scala on Window or Mac. It’d be great to be able to tune an external synth or iOS synth to an Arabic or Indian mode.