User:Hkm/Intro page: Difference between revisions

Xenharmonic music usually sounds “off” to most listeners at first. This subsides eventually, and most people gradually find that xenharmonic music sounds more expressive and varied than music in 12edo.  

Here’s what you can find on this page—read the section that is most relevant to you.

''DotuXil: Collected refractions.''

''Anything by Stephen Weigel''

Xenharmonic music is more interesting to make than music in 12edo because there are significant amounts of unexplored territory. (No one’s written a metal song in 18edo, for example.) Some xenharmonic tunings are also easier to work with than 12edo (although most are more difficult).

You can play around with tunings in Scale Workshop before you use them. Larger tunings are more difficult to work with. You might have read that some tuning system is optimal in some way; such claims mean very little and usually come attached to tuning systems that are too unwieldy (>24 notes) to start with. If you want to work within these tuning systems anyway, you might want to work with a small subset of the notes available (which is what most xenharmonic composers do)

=== Physical instruments to use ===

Here are a few physical instruments that can play xen music, sorted by price. The two cheapest options are good enough for most purposes.

Kalimbas and mbiras can be retuned to xenharmonic scales, although trying to retune them to scales of more than seven notes can pose problems.

Can play edos up to 22 (if you care about having decent range) or higher (if you don’t) as an isomorphic keyboard, which means that if you play one pattern, move your hand somewhere else on the keyboard, and play the same pattern there, the two patterns will be exactly the same except that one will be higher than the other. Can also play any of the tunings in the earlier section handily.  

You’ve heard of this one before. Spaces between frets get too small for comfort around 27edo, although a solution for 41edo (having frets for every other note in the scale and finding the whole gamut through other strings) is isomorphic and uniquely elegant. Fretless guitars are also an option.

Marketed as a cheap alternative to the Lumatone.

Deals well with some scales with fewer than 12 notes, and a select number of larger scales. Not the best option if you don’t already have one

By far the most difficult option out of these. All string instruments can play xenharmonic music, although there’s a little more inherent inaccuracy in the smaller ones. Fretless guitar is the best and the cheapest.

Everything you could want out of a xenharmonic instrument if you like using scales smaller than 36 notes per octave. Also works somewhat well for larger scales. Generally considered to not be worth the price.

==== DAW-based options ====