midi is out of tune

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epando83

New member
hi! i have a pt2620 crystal 4281 chipset, and no matter wich program i use, all the midi is out of tune, a little more than a semitone higher. please help me!!! i have absolutley no idea what could it be! i'm using a sound blaster 16 on the same computer and the pitch is correct.
 
Well, almost every Creative cards have built in MIDI engine. But I'm not sure if cheap soundcard has built in MIDI synth on it. Hey, you know the card is cheap, eh? You better get better MIDI device for serious work. Cheap is... you know... cheap... Why would you... gees... it's cheap, right?

;)
Jaymz
 
Check the settings to make sure you don't have everything transposed somehow. That's the only reason it should be out of tune.
 
Arif Driessen said:
Yeah, check that every wheel on your keyboard is facing down, towards you
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Aren't the pitch and modulation wheels supposed to be centered in the middle not facing downward? Otherwise, how are you supposed to pitch down or modulate down when it's already down? And I don't see how your synth is out of tune unless it's a really old synth. All the more recent synths don't have tuning capabilities on them because they play in tune. Are you testing it with a tuner and that is how you know it is out of tune?
 
All the more recent synths don't have tuning capabilities on them because they play in tune.
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I thought all modern synths could have their pitches tweaked like mad, to allow for all kinds of microtuning and different forms of intonation.
 
AlChuck said:
I thought all modern synths could have their pitches tweaked like mad, to allow for all kinds of microtuning and different forms of intonation.
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Oh yeah....I know you can change the pitch and everything on one note or all the notes. I meant, the actual overall tuning of the instrument. If you're not sending a pitch change or a modulation control, then when you hit an A it will play 440Hz. The older synths would usually go out of tune for awhile. So that even if you pitched an A down a half step it would still be an out of tune G#. But the new synths don't have an actual tuning feature.
 
bennychico11 said:
Oh yeah....I know you can change the pitch and everything on one note or all the notes. I meant, the actual overall tuning of the instrument. If you're not sending a pitch change or a modulation control, then when you hit an A it will play 440Hz. The older synths would usually go out of tune for awhile. So that even if you pitched an A down a half step it would still be an out of tune G#. But the new synths don't have an actual tuning feature.
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Nonsense... many new and old synths had a global transpose that allows on to shift the pitch by up to two octaves.
 
no no no, i'm not talking about being able to transpose, or pitch, or modulate a note or a set of notes. i'm talking about the synth going out of tune. Like the way a flute or trumpet would go out of tune. When you play the flute you can change pitch by pressing a different key or bending the note with your embrochure...but these things are different than the tuning of the actual instrument. before you play a song you'd want to tune your flute to a specific frequency then later you can bend notes, change notes, etc., to your hearts content. But you want the overall instrument to be in tune with itself. Same way with synths. The older synths would have a tuning feature to help get the overall instrument in tune. THEN you could modulate, transpose, etc.
 
While I'm no keyboard guru, I've never heard of that problem.... are you saying that with certain keyboards, A-440 isn't necessarily A-440????

That's hard to picture --- maybe in old FM mod synths where the sounds were generated internally (ie, not samples)... but even then, the circuit design would incorporate standard tuning mathemetics, so there's no reason it should be out of tune.

ANd on new boards where the keyboard is really just a midi controller for the sampled sound (internal or otherwise), the only way they could be out of tune is if the samples themselves are out of tune, or the midi pitch/transpose settings of the keyboard itself is changed.
 
Yeah, it's only the older synths. I think it has to do with the idea that because they were analog component the oscillators would fall out of tune every once and awhile. Probably because of heat problems, repetative usage, etc. I'm no keyboard guru either, but this is what I was always told. I found a link that helps explain some of it:
http://www.microtonal.freeservers.com/post107.html

I also know that the older Moogs had to be tuned. Does anyone else know more about this?
 
epando83 said:
hi! i have a pt2620 crystal 4281 chipset, and no matter wich program i use, all the midi is out of tune, a little more than a semitone higher. please help me!!! i have absolutley no idea what could it be! i'm using a sound blaster 16 on the same computer and the pitch is correct.
Click to expand...

This could be totally unrelated but...

I've got two computers. One runs SONAR and the other runs GigaStudio. Midi tracks on the SONAR computer are sent to the Giga computer, the audio from the Giga computer comes back over a SPDIF line and is recorded on an audio track in the SONAR computer.

My SONAR computer is set to record at 48Khz. If the PCI card in my Giga computer accidentally gets set to 44.1 KHz, I get the problem you mention. Audio coming back from the Giga computer is sharp (or flat, I forget which) by a semitone or two.

Check to see if your soundcard and your tracking software are set to the same sampling rate. Probably a long shot but what the hell...
 
I've had cheap soundcards before where the actual samples were out of tune, or so aliased that they sounded out of tune. But if every patch on this card is out of tune, you've probably got a global transpose or tuning option set wrong somewhere.

Synth oscillators drifting out of tune is a problem with analog synths, not digital. Built-in soundcard synths are going to be digital. So the possibilities here are:
1. Broken card
2. Poorly sampled patch
3. A setting wrong somewhere
4. It's MIDI'd to something with a bad pitch wheel (I've had that problem).

I wouldn't waste my time fixing it, though. Just stick to plugins, or save your pennies and get a hardware synth.
 
bennychico11 said:
Aren't the pitch and modulation wheels supposed to be centered in the middle not facing downward?
Click to expand...

good point. i meant, just make sure the wheels facing the correct angle/position... the vibrato wheel should be facing down
 
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