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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 90475, member: 27"] Strike a plate or a membrane model, and the partials coming back are not whole-number multiples of the fundamental. That is the whole point of the model. It is also why a bell patch can sound sour against a piano. Equal temperament was built around harmonic spectra, the kind a string or a pipe produces. Feed it a drumhead and the maths stops lining up. Intervals that normally read as consonant start to grate, because consonance tracks the spectrum of the sound making it. William Sethares set this out in Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale in 1998, arguing that the scale which sounds right depends on the instrument producing it. Modal synths make the idea practical. You can hear the spectrum shift in real time while you drag a material control. [HEADING=2]Inharmonic spectra pull against equal temperament[/HEADING] RipplerX puts inharmonicity on a knob, and turning it is the fastest demonstration you will get. Push it up, and the upper partials drift away from the fundamental you played. The note stays put; the tail does not. That drift is where clashes start. A drumhead or plate model layered under a tuned bass will beat against it, and the problem is not your mixing. Two spectra are disagreeing about where the octave sits. Sethares pointed at Thai and Indonesian tuning systems for this reason. Those traditions grew around metallophones and gongs whose partials never matched a Western harmonic series, and by his argument the scales followed the instruments rather than the other way round. You have two honest fixes. Pull the inharmonicity back until the model behaves like a string, which throws away the character you loaded it for. Or leave the model alone and move the tuning to meet it. [HEADING=2]MTS-ESP retunes every client from one master[/HEADING] ODDSound built MTS-ESP around a single global tuning table that updates in real time. One master plugin holds the tuning, every supporting instrument in the session reads from it, and clients need no setup beyond being loaded. Run only one master per project. MTS-ESP Mini is [B]a free microtuning plugin that costs you nothing[/B] to test, and it covers the core behaviour. The paid Suite widens compatibility to more plugins and to hardware. RipplerX reads MTS-ESP directly, and [URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/refx-introduced-the-rippler-physical-modeling-synth.75875/'][B]the Scala-friendly Rippler build reFX now ships[/B][/URL] and accepts an MTS client alongside its own file loading. There is one gap worth knowing about. Certain details of scale structure are not passed through to clients, so microtonal step sequencing driven from the tuning source is currently out of reach. For straightforward retuning, it is still the quickest route in a busy session. [HEADING=2]Scala files still matter when MTS is not an option[/HEADING] A .scl file is plain text describing the intervals in a scale, nothing more. It tells the instrument what the pitches are. It says nothing about which key produces which pitch. That job belongs to the .kbm mapping file, which decides where each scale degree lands on the keyboard, which MIDI note carries the root, and which reference frequency anchors the whole thing. Load a scale without a mapping, and the instrument falls back on defaults, usually centred on middle C or A440. It plays, but you have given up control over the layout. Scala itself, written by Manuel Op de Coul, is free and still the standard tool for building and converting these files. If you would rather start from something proven, Surge XT ships 182 scl and kbm files in its factory tuning library, and they load into any instrument that reads the format. The useful move with modal synths is to work backwards. Set the model first, listen to where its partials actually fall, then pick a tuning that agrees with them rather than one inherited from keyboard instruments that never had this problem. [/QUOTE]

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