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Author Topic: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.  (Read 17614 times)

aaron

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Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« on: January 09, 2016, 12:42:27 pm »
A quarter tone is the pitch between what normal pitches we know of in our chromatic scale. Instead of moving notes up and down the scale a semitone at a time (which is half a tone), we move a quarter a tone at a time. Quarter tones have been used in music around the world for quite an impressive amount of time.

My question is this, what is stopping this technique from catching on in western music? Is it because it's to hard for artists and composers to implement today? Is it too awkward and weird for the usual audience?

Bonus points if you can point to some producers using quarter tones now. I'd love to hear it in use, or even how they use it.
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guillotine

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #1 on: January 09, 2016, 02:00:12 pm »
Well, from my point of view, it's just a pain to set everything to +0.50, especially when working with synthesizers. I'm not sure though really, I feel like I might try it properly and see how it goes. I think it's just a personal laziness (Which I'm also guilty for :P)

However I believe this producer uses quarter tones in his melody sections which you might find interesting. Check out 0:41.
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aaron

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2016, 02:12:53 pm »
Quote from: Guillotine on January 09, 2016, 02:00:12 pm
Well, from my point of view, it's just a pain to set everything to +0.50, especially when working with synthesizers. I'm not sure though really, I feel like I might try it properly and see how it goes. I think it's just a personal laziness (Which I'm also guilty for :P)

However I believe this producer uses quarter tones in his melody sections which you might find interesting. Check out 0:41.

To do it properly wouldn't you need two instances of whatever plugin?
one at normal pitch, the second at +0.50 to get the full range of notes.

That song was really neat by the way! Thanks for sharing that. It had the middle ground of arabic tone quarter notes, and creepy dissonant quarter tones.
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guillotine

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #3 on: January 09, 2016, 02:19:23 pm »
To do it properly wouldn't you need two instances of whatever plugin?
one at normal pitch, the second at +0.50 to get the full range of notes.

That song was really neat by the way! Thanks for sharing that. It had the middle ground of arabic tone quarter notes, and creepy dissonant quarter tones.
[/quote]
It would sound weird if you did that. Too much difference would cause weird mud and that. But maybe I'm confused and thinking of creating a track that is up by 0.5 of a semitone. I think that's what you meant anyways?

No problem man! He's a dope producer with a really interesting combination of vibes.
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ocularedm

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #4 on: January 09, 2016, 06:14:19 pm »
Hey Guillotine!
Cool seeing you here.

Anyways, while quarter tones are really interesting, they're almost unnoticeable to people who were not raised listening to them. That's the main reason that they're not used as much.

Another thing that is stopping (specifically electronic) composers from making music like this is the fact that our DAWs are based around pianos. It's not really possible to make music with quarter tones without having two instances of a synth with one being detuned by half a semitone, as Guillotine said.
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cryophonik

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #5 on: January 09, 2016, 06:16:43 pm »
Quote from: Guillotine on January 09, 2016, 02:00:12 pm
Well, from my point of view, it's just a pain to set everything to +0.50, especially when working with synthesizers. I'm not sure though really, I feel like I might try it properly and see how it goes. I think it's just a personal laziness (Which I'm also guilty for :P)

However I believe this producer uses quarter tones in his melody sections which you might find interesting. Check out 0:41.

If you listen to the way the pitch bends and over/undershoots the target, it sounds to me like he's accomplishing that with the pitch wheel, rather than using a quarter-tone scale.  You could get even more accuracy by setting the pitch bend range to +/- 1 and automating the pitch bend in fourths.  Cool track!
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Nadav

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #6 on: January 09, 2016, 07:22:50 pm »
BTW, whenever somebody mentions quarter-tones people naturally start talking about Eastern music, but there's actually a few examples of quarter-tones used in popular Western music.

For instance, in Outkast's "The Whole World", the vocal melody uses quarter-tones on that part where he's like "sing alooooooong". He goes a quarter-tone flat on purpose.

Another less famous but not totally obscure example is from Days of the New's first album, on one of the songs (I forget which one--maybe "How Do You Know You"?) the singer does a similar thing as in the Outkast song.
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Pzychosis

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #7 on: January 09, 2016, 08:07:54 pm »
Like Ocular said, doing quarter tones is overly difficult because of the piano setup, and as most said, you would have to create two synths. I did personally find an optimal way by linking the detune to a controller ( I personally set it to a button that is on my midi keyboard.) and set min at the normal chromatic scale and the max to the 0.5 as to reach all 24ish notes so every time I interchanged with notes in between chromatic notes, I pressed the button so as soon as I hit the key at the same time the note is a quarter tone above that. I've never actually made a song like this though, because like they said, even then, it is still pretty difficult and a lot of work just to get it to work.
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epicycle

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #8 on: January 09, 2016, 08:25:45 pm »
If you want quarter tones without two synths, just use the pitch wheel?
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Lighght

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #9 on: January 09, 2016, 10:57:58 pm »
Quote from: Ocular on January 09, 2016, 06:14:19 pm


Anyways, while quarter tones are really interesting, they're almost unnoticeable to people who were not raised listening to them. That's the main reason that they're not used as much.


I dont agree with this because normally when someone is using quarter tones or different intonations they are creating a whole different scale with different relations between the notes and sets completely different moods. An example of this would be The Cactus Rosary by Terry Riley(cant find a full youtube link of the studio recording but check spotify maybe). It has a completely retuned scale and the intervals between notes create completely different effects.

One way to get around the piano roll not allowing alternate tunings is to try out a program called Scala which allows you to remap your midi to playing different scales (as in not just 0.5+ on everything but completely remapped) Hope this helps

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spatten

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #10 on: January 10, 2016, 12:10:43 am »
I have only heard of quarter notes but never used them. In fact, how would one even go about doing a scale in those? Do we essentially have 24 notes in the "chromatic" quarter note scale? Is it as simple as having some tones where there werent any before or does the harmony become doubly complicated?
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guillotine

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #11 on: January 10, 2016, 12:23:01 am »
Quote from: cryophonik on January 09, 2016, 06:16:43 pm
If you listen to the way the pitch bends and over/undershoots the target, it sounds to me like he's accomplishing that with the pitch wheel, rather than using a quarter-tone scale.  You could get even more accuracy by setting the pitch bend range to +/- 1 and automating the pitch bend in fourths.  Cool track!

I think he's using a mixture of pitch bending and the quarter tone scale. Or he could have a really long legato going on within his synth.
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Nadav

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #12 on: January 10, 2016, 01:35:48 am »
Quote from: spatten on January 10, 2016, 12:10:43 am
I have only heard of quarter notes but never used them. In fact, how would one even go about doing a scale in those? Do we essentially have 24 notes in the "chromatic" quarter note scale? Is it as simple as having some tones where there werent any before or does the harmony become doubly complicated?

I suggest choosing 2 or 3 notes from whatever regular scale you're using and flatting or sharping them a quarter tone. That should create the interesting effect you want. Play around with it, and be picky about when you use it.
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trifonic

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #13 on: January 10, 2016, 05:57:10 am »
Several of the NI synths have microtuning settings built in. FM8 allows you to adjust the keyscaling of pitch with microtonality in mind. Absynth has a robust tuning customization section with presets for all sorts of microtunings as well as customized microtunings.
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museumoftechno

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Re: Quarter Tones in modern electronic music.
« Reply #14 on: January 10, 2016, 03:10:24 pm »
Quote from: Nadav on January 10, 2016, 01:35:48 am
I suggest choosing 2 or 3 notes from whatever regular scale you're using and flatting or sharping them a quarter tone. That should create the interesting effect you want. Play around with it, and be picky about when you use it.

Yeh this can sound really good. I used to have a Nord Micromodular, and one of my favourite patches I came up with was one where one note in the sequence was broken: if you played a certain note (say it was a D) the sound was appallingly flat, and went through extra diodes, DC offsets and saturation. It was like having a part-broken synth, or a guitar with a dodgy string.
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