If the microtuning capabilities of your DAW aren’t cutting the compositional mustard, Oddsound may have a solution in the form of the MTS-ESP Suite, a new plugin that can be used to handle the tuning of all of your in-the-box and external synths.
This was developed with the help of Richard James - AKA Aphex Twin - who was also dissatisfied with the current state of tuning support in electronic music making.
Although many DAWs do offer microctuning capabilities that enable you to go beyond the 12-note Western scale, getting everything synced up can be tricky. Oddsound is designed to alleviate this problem by letting you control everything from one interface, and all in real-time.
So, you can change notes or chords as they’re being played, transpose all instruments at once or morph into an entirely different tuning system. Your tuning explorations are visualised on the interface, so you can keep track of exactly what’s going on.
You can retune using MTS-ESP, MPE, MTS SysEx or MIDI pitchbend, and everything can be automated if you wish. You can also import tuning and mapping files in a variety of formats.
The good news is that several developers already support MTS-ESP - including Audio Damage, Audiorealism, u-he and Xfter Records - so some of their software will get into tuning sync automatically. It’s expected that more companies will follow.
You can find out more and download a 30-day demo version on the Oddsound website. MTS-ESP Suite runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats. There’s also a feature-limited free version, MTS-ESP MINI.
