On Sat, 8 Mar 1997, Nick S Bensema wrote:
> Excellent. I'm looking forward to seeing what you find.
I have some preliminaries right here. No octave values, though, because I
don't have any way to establish what "C1" is (no keyboard handy).
> It does. When you experiment with SoundX, you will find that certain
> distortions have certain frequency ranges.
I'm coming more from the Atari8 camp where the pure tones are all grouped
into one distortion (with far more than 32 values per distortion). The
various octaves of the 2600 seem to be split up into several distortions.
As usual, the 2600 is more quirky than I thought, even though the actual
tones the 2600 make are quite similar to POKEY, both using the same basic
method of generating tones, and thus both exhibiting the same problem of
bad tuning.
> One of mine does, which only tunes to E, A, D, G and B.
Ah, mine's chromatic, which I needed since I do a lot of different tunings
on my guitar.
Here are my preliminary results.... The tuner can't really read very high
frequencies, so I can only give the basic pitch. This is a quickie table
that may not be perfect because tuners sometimes pick up harmonics rather
than the fundementals, but it's fairly accurate. This is only for
distortions 4 and 1. 1 is for lower tones, and 4 extends into the higher
ones. These two tables alone should be enough to form the foundation of
some music demos. We'll see. We'll have to take this information and
build sub-tables that contain only well-tempered intervals. I think
variation +/-5 cents will result in music that is fairly in-tune. Maybe
one or two notes in the scale that are up to 10 cents out of tune are
okay. If you limit it to notes that are all in perfect tune in relation
to eachother, you may have slim pickins in the notes.
Dist Note# Note Variation from perfect pitch (440hz A standard)
4 1 B ? Highest 2600 tone I think, goes down from here
2 E
3 B (seems to be perfect octave below 1)
4 G
5 E (All notes here too high for tuner to measure
6 C# so variations from perfect pitch are unknown & can)
7 B ultimately only be estimated by me whistling or
8 A playing some instrument an exact octave or two
9 G below for the tuner to read...)
10 F +50
11 E -20
12 D 0
13 C# +20
14 C -5
15 B -15
16 A# -20
17 A -20
18 G# -15
19 G 0
20 F# +15
21 F +40
22 F -50
23 E -20
24 D# +15
25 D +50
26 D -20
27 C# +20
28 C# -50
29 C 0
30 B +50
31 B -15
1 1 C -5
2 F -5
3 C 0
4 G# +11
5 F -5
6 D +30
7 C 0
8 A# -8
9 G# +10
10 F# +50
11 F -5
12 E -50
13 D +30
14 C# +10
15 C 0
16 B -10
17 A# -10
18 A 0
19 G# +10
20 G +30
21 F# +50
22 F# -30
23 F -5
24 E +30
25 E -50
26 D# -10
27 D +35
28 D -32
29 C# +10
30 C# -50
31 C1? 0 Lowest 2600 note?
I'll try to go through as may of the distortions as possible and work on
this as long as noone else comes forward and claims the project.
Ultimately I'd create a chart, give each note an octave value, then build
new tables with "good" tempering, going up the scale showing which
distortion and tone value to use. Then maybe I'll build a chart to show
which particular scales in which keys are possible. Maybe we can get a
well-tempered major and minor scale somewhere out of this over a couple
octaves, which would be enough for most musical ideas.
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