Microtonal Transcription Basics
Since about 2015, I’ve been dabbling in “microtonality” – something that may seem scary or nonsensical to the casual observer (but is deeply rewarding)! If you look at a piano and count the notes in octave, you get 12. These make up standard piano tuning, “12-tone equal temperament” (often abbreviated “12-TET,” or “12-EDO,” or “12edo”). As 12-TET is the standard in Western music, any tuning system which deviates may be called “microtonal.”
So how does one get started with microtonal transcription? The most difficult elements are notation and syntax. When transcribing microtonal music, it is beneficial to know what tuning system the artist used to generate the musical material. Reverse engineering is more difficult. Standard 12-TET transcription gives us 12 possibilities for what kinds of notes to use, which function as a finite set of logical paths that one can draw from. Luckily, in microtonal transcription, these finite constraints make it easier to eliminate possible notes. Consequently, I think it’s harder to transcribe in just intonation (a tuning system having intervals that are acoustically pure) if you haven’t been told what the scale is. Most of the time, this different finite system will be a different numbered equal temperament, such as 15-TET, or 17-TET, or 22-TET, etc. When transcribing microtonal songs, I must be familiar with how the given intervals of a TET interact within that system, and their possible relationships. This is partially helped through temperament ideas, partially through doing the work yourself (playing instruments and making connections), and partially through ear training. Before trying to hear microtonal intervals, I habitually “rounded” everything to 12-TET to explain it, which makes things easier but also causes you to miss out on lots of nuances.
Microtonal transcription often requires multiple strategies since the notation might not be helpful, or the stretch and shrink of the tuning system (such as 31-TET) may be sensitive enough that something notated as a particular pitch on paper may appear roughly a degree flat or sharp depending on what metric you use. Here are some software tools I use in transcribing microtonal music:
Dorico Pro 3.5: I use Dorico for all my microtonal notation because it supports playback with custom accidental systems from the get-go. It’s the only notation software (currently) that makes notating microtonal music just as easy as notating 12-TET music. Notating just intonation (that’s complex) is still quite difficult though, because of the sheer number of accidentals one must choose from. So the only thing I would change about Dorico’s accidental system would be making it able to “combine” accidentals together, specifically for the circumstance of Just Intonation. Other notation software can be microtonal; but the workarounds are spectacularly convoluted.
Reaper/Absynth: Reaper is my DAW – it’s cheap, microtonally friendly (custom piano rolls) and the shortcuts are intuitive. I use Absynth from Native instruments as a synthesizer because it’s easy to re-tune with a .gly file, or individual notes by hand. Sometimes in transcription, I will fire up a synthesizer and “play along” to the music to see which notes really match. This works great in a situation where things are really xenharmonic (deviating from 12-TET), chromatic, and/or the notation system itself isn’t easy to “think” in. I used this strategy when transcribing Brendan Byrnes’s 27-TET and 22-TET music.
Melodyne: I like to use Melodyne to see the height of pitchces. I tend to use it if there are fast microtonal notes that are hard to pinpoint, or as a last resort in difficult polyphonic situations. I used Melodyne to help transcribe Stephen James Taylor’s 31-TET “Quantum Tonality” video and Auri Luve’s microtonal harmony exercises.
Fretfind 2D: I use this site to generate a guitar chart for any guitar parts I’m transcribing that have complex notation, as an “answer key” for where the notes are! I print out a TET fretboard and then write the notes in by hand, keeping that paper next to me when I’m transcribing. It’s most important for melodic playing that uses a lot of the neck.
I’ve been analyzing music and deciphering chord progressions for a while, so microtonality was the logical next step. It’s a fun puzzle! In difficult situations, it’s best to try and attack things from multiple angles– which I believe is the secret to ear training. If you’re unsure about a note or sonority, never be satisfied with one method, but guess and check in different ways, using different tools and varying surrounding intervals. The key to cracking those thornier patches is harnessing the power of educated guesswork: guesses that can’t end up overly contradicting each other. I like to check with synths, timbre lock, piano, singing, perfect pitch memory, Dorico, Melodyne, and the overall “impression” of the texture that I get from the music at any given moment. Of course, you can simply compare any given note to various other notes, instead of just one method. To me, that’s the secret to something sounding xenharmonic (not conforming to the common 12-tone equal temperament)– when the multiple comparisons you make to a given note drastically fail in 12-TET, or are cumbersome to explain in 12-TET terms.
There’s a lot more to talk about, but if this subject interests you, check out the Xenharmonic Alliance on Facebook, the Xenharmonic Alliance discord server, Sevish’s music, my YouTube channel, and the podcast Now and Xen; those are good starting points!
