chimeratio.bandcamp.com
jangler.bandcamp.com

Yamaha PSR-225

Our track was written for the Yamaha PSR-225, this is one of the first musical instruments I owned as a kid in the 90s. While there was some appeal in pushing something usually seen as more of a cheap beginner's instrument to make strange sounds, it was actually chosen over other Yamaha MU series stuff with the same sounds for a practical reason. While it's incredibly cut down compared to the MU series it's based off of, it actually recognizes things like rapid changes in volume/panning/etc very tightly compared to these alternatives. This allowed for us to make a very textural MIDI doing types of sound design we wouldn't have been able to approach on something more "advanced" as cleanly.

It was made using jangler's wonderful tracker-style MIDI sequencer called "Faunatone", which is designed around accommodating microtonality in this format. There were actually a number of idiosyncrasies that popped up relating to both the PSR itself, and chaoticness of the stuff we wrote, which required jangler to update it with new features even! Quite a bit of time was spent troubleshooting until it played exactly how we had intended. I'd be a fool to not mention what a profound contribution they did by making the entire piece of software we used to write this in the first place---even updating it just for this track. Thank you jangler!!!!

While this track isn't actually dominantly microtonal, the fact that Faunatone is built around making that easy certainly made it natural for us to use odd tuning in many parts. The non-12edo stuff is mostly either 48edo or just arbitrary detuning.

-- Chimeratio