Fat Bebe Micro (19ET)

This is a microtonal Jazz-ish piece produced with some newly developed techniques.

Norm Harris provides the excellent percussion. I probably could have made it easier on myself by not being so chromatic… but there it is.

The piano, bass, and saxophones are a Roland GR-20 played in 19 notes per octave – how this is done is described below.

Fender guitar to Roland GR-20 – the GR-20 has “local control off” and each string has its data sent on a separate channel
midi from the GR-20 (the play of the mustang) goes to the laptop (midi to usb)

Fractal Tune Smithy takes the midi in and re-tunes it live from 12 edo to 19 edo using closest midi note + pitch bend commands
the re-tuned midi data is sent back to the GR-20

The GR-20 plays the data and gives analog output and the analog out is sent to the Alesis mixer and then to the desktop computer

The desktop running Sonar uses the analog input as it would any live signal and records it.

The lead guitar is a Fender Squier Strat copy which I ripped off the frets and then back filled the fret cuts with plastic wood + sanded. The Squier is run through an Alesis mix into Sonar with Guitar Rig 4.

I took about 6 shots at the lead using Sonar’s automatic multiple take function and then edited the takes to take what I wanted. The leads could be better – though this is the first time I tried something so microtonal in this idiom with the fretless guitar.

Contributors:
Norm Harris, Percussionist