Oops - sorry Herb. I read it on a NI forum. No disrespect to your own team of coders! Since I've got your attention, can you think about an upgrade to the Vienna Instrument, to permit non-equal temperaments?

Best wishes!

Anyone doing Early Music (where thy also want gut strings and Baroque bows) need non-vibrato; Anyone into modern repetoire like the Kronos Quartet,Steve Reich's Violin Phase, etc ditto.

I've heard that the Vienna Instrument is based around code from Native Instruments - as in Kontakt etc. If so, a modification for non- equal temperament should be very very easy. Kontakt has dozens of scripts to do this...

I agree. Let's have a complete "Baroque orchestra" set!

I'd love a set of cornetto samples, for Monteverdi and Bach.

Thanks for the Scala reference.


In general, we need virtual instruments like the Vienna Instrument to allow us more freedom to "misbehave" creatively. I used to own a couple of Akai S3000 samplers, with limited ram and no possibility of anything like the VSL Legato Tool. Of course I don't want to go back to that. But with an Akai, once I got the samples into the machine, I figure I had far more easy possibilities to mis-use the samples than I do now. Pitching samples up or down by eight octaves, creating extravagant pitch wheel glissandos, filtering, reversing and generally manhandling the audio was easy and fun. Now it feels as if we're being forced into obedience, forced into correctness by the interface.
I don't think what I want would take a terrifying amount of work to implement. Loads of free VST soft synths have these sorts of thing as standard.

I'd like the VSL team to consider including some kind of customizable tuning table in the next version of the Vienna Instrument. I want to be able to play in various temperaments, including just intonation in any key, and any of the historical temperaments used in Baroque music (Mean Tone, Valotti, Kirnberger, Werckmeister etc. This (plus the ability to switch instantly between A 415 and A 440) seems absolutely essential for the Vienna harpsichord and organ. Maybe you should also consider implementing hermode tuning on all polyphonic patches.

Some of the exotic percussion instruments (lithophones, verrophones and such) might benefit from being able to play them in quarter tone and even eighth tone chromatic tuning. Playing a fast chromatic run up an instrument tuned in eighth tone increments always sounds really exciting. Pelog and other non-Western tuned scales would also be useful.

I really think you have to give people more options than just +/- 2 semitones for pitch bend. Pitch bending a string section up or down two octaves may not sound "natural" - in the sense of being a believable facsimile of a live orchestra. But that doesn't mean you should censor us from trying it, just for fun! Allow us to break the rules, and get creative with these wonderful samples!

And, arguably, it's going back out of fashion now. Steve Reich likes all his instruments and voices to perform essentially non-vibrato. Much of the new, commissioned repertoire of the Kronos Quartet starts from a non-vibrato sound in which vibrato is an occasional variation.

Well, there is now a Vienna harpsichord. Can it play in historical temperaments or pitch standards?

The whole issue of pitch and temperament will have to be addressed eventually. Some 20th century repertoire (eg Ligeti) also requires microtones.

Since there are cheap and even free VST soft synths that permit user tuning tables, hermode tuning etc, I can't imagine it would be difficult for VSL to write code to make this possible. Let's pester them!

I find the solo strings library mostly too vibrato heavy for my purposes. So if you have any way round this, I'd like to know it. I recently bought the UVI Ircam instruments collection. Some of these patches, though far more basic in their programming, come closer to the sound I want.

By the way, gr. What do you do about tuning/temperament issues in early music? Is there a way to make the Vienna Instrument play in Valotti, mean tone, just intonation or whatever?