J. Anthony Allen explains why Ableton Live 12 supports non-Western tunings beyond the standard 12-note system. Many cultures use alternative pitch systems, and artists like Aphex Twin use custom tunings creatively. Learn how to adjust tunings in Ableton Live.
Okay. In the previous class, I talked about this tunings bit here, and I want to go into that a little bit more. Now. How does that fit into recording? It doesn't a ton. It's just that there's no great place to put this in my whole scheme of all of these classes. And so I wanted to put it here just to get it into your head while you're filming, starting to think about producing music with live. So just a few videos on this. I'm not going to go into an insane amount of detail on it, but. So first, why do we have this? Why would you want to retune your whole system? So let me explain what this is one more time. If you look at a piano, you don't need to know how to play piano for this to make sense. So we have 12 notes to the octave. It goes here and then the next black note, and then white note, and then black note, white note, black note, white note, black note. Oops, I'm backwards of black note, white note, black note, white note and then white note again. These are the same. Oh, this is hard to do in mirror. These are the same note but an octave higher. Okay. So all you really need to know is this one is called C and this one is called C. Okay? These are both Cs. There are 12 notes per octave. So we take the span of an octave and we chop it into 12 equal notes. This is a system that we've used for the last several hundred years called equal temperament. And the system we used before that was pretty close to it, almost identical. But if you, you know, listen to people who perform music in a. In a period, way, meaning like they perform music exactly like Vivaldi would have heard it, it's going to sound a little bit different because the tuning system was very slightly different back then. But anyway, our system of doing it, equal temperament is not universal. Not everywhere in the world uses equal temperament. So this idea that we can change our tuning is something that is really exciting if you make music in a culture that doesn't use the same equal temperament system that we have. So this really kind of opens up the use of LIVE to people from all over the world who may not have had an interest in producing electronic music before, because there was no way for them to do it without doing really weird stuff or making music that was in a system that was very foreign to them. But also people that are, you know, that have grown up, you know, hearing the equal temperament system like most of us have, they. A lot of those people have been experimenting with alternate tunings for a long time. Someone like Aphex Twin, for years, has done things where he's retuned his. Some of his synthesizers to get different notes. And that's why when you listen to some of his music, some of those keyboards just sound off in a weird, kind of disturbing way. And that's because he's tuned to a whole different tuning system. So it's really cool that we can just change it. It's wild, and it's going to do amazing things for music. So let's talk about how you would change it if you wanted to do it.
