Taken at a Board of Trustees presentation at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, June 14, and sent to me from renowned experimental guitarist and head of the Berklee microtonal music club, David Fiuczynski, we see in the above photo, pictured from left, David Fiuczynski (a.k.a. Fuze), Berklee President Roger Brown and keyboard student Takeru Yamazaki.

The green TPX4s keyboard belongs to Takeru. On top of the keyboard is what looks like a Korg mini-KP (KAOSS Pad). I’m told the event included a performance involving Tonal Plexus keyboards, and I hope to have some more details to share soon. Thanks for the photo, Fuze!

I was pleased recently when Tonal Plexus owner Aaron Wolf alerted me to Automat, a free Audio Unit synthesizer for Mac OSX which has implemented full dynamic retuning support for Tonal Plexus TPX keyboards, as well as .tun 1.0 support for compatibility with CSE and conventional keyboards.

Tonal Plexus owners can open Automat as a plugin in any AU host application (GarageBand, Logic, DP, Reaper, etc.) and tune it up dynamically with the Plexus on-the-fly, without loading any tuning tables at all. This is the same GM microtuning functionality implemented in the commercial software Pianoteq which I’ve been raving about lately.

The same is true for TBX1 owners. You can send MIDI out from your controller to TBX1, and send that TUNED output to Automat (or Pianoteq), for dynamic retuning without tuning tables.

Or, you can retune your conventional keyboard in Automat using tuning tables; just use CSE to create your tunings and export them as .tun files to the following location:

~/Library/Audio/Presets/alphakanal/Automat1/tunings

(where ~ means YourHardDrive/Users/YourUserName)

Then just select your tuning in Automat, and you’re good to go.

Note for U-PLEX users: you need to have a serious AU host such as Logic, DP, or Reaper in order to use Automat or Pianoteq as AU plugin synths for dynamic retuning. Apple’s entry-level sequencer, GarageBand, does not allow you to select the MIDI input; instead, all MIDI inputs are active. As a result, U-PLEX won’t produce tuned output in GB; however, TPX keyboards can be used with GB just fine.

It would be great if the .tun 2.0 standard were implemented in Automat, so that .msf would be supported, allowing U-PLEX to be used with Automat in GarageBand. Until then, Mac U-PLEX users should invest a little more in a professional AU host.

Fast on the heels of completing full tuning support for Tonal Plexus keyboards, Modartt has just announced a new, more affordable version of Pianoteq called Pianoteq Play, selling for 99 Euros, or about 120 USD (about one third the price of the full version of Pianoteq).

This version does come with some limitations, so the first question to answer is: does it support all the tuning functions of the full version? The answer is: YES! You get full Tonal Plexus compatibility – on the fly retuning with no tuning tables necessary, as well as Scala .scl and .kbm compatibility with CSE (Custom Scale Editor) software for retuning conventional keyboards.

What you don’t get are advanced controls over the sound of the instrument, but if you are simply after the sound of a piano, absence of those controls should not bother you in the least. I highly recommended this new version of Pianoteq for its tuning capabilities and its affordability. Great work, again, Modartt!