I recently wrote a tutorial about how to change the root note of your microtonal scale, where I used Scala’s Edit Mapping dialog. There is so much more I want to say about keyboard mappings. This time I’m explaining how to map various microtonal tunings on to a standard MIDI keyboard in a sensible way.

Needless to say, this topic is important for musicians who want to use microtonal tunings on their standard MIDI keyboard controller. I’ll be using Scala for this tutorial.

First, an explainer on “scale degrees”

This is an incredibly simple but powerful idea. Scale degrees are numbers that describe the order of notes in a scale. The root note of a scale is always scale degree 0, and the degree numbers increase as you go up the scale. For a 7 note scale, the scale starts on degree 0, then passes through 1-6. When we reach 7, we’re an octave up from where we started. In this case, 7 would be called the octave degree.

The familiar 12-equal scale could also be described with scale degrees. Let’s take C to be our root note, so C = 0. The rest is as follows:

Name C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C’ Scale degree 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

When we’re working with large scales, notating by scale degree becomes an efficient way of describing what notes we want to play. We will also use scale degrees to tell Scala how to map notes to a keyboard.

How to map a 7-note tuning to the white keys

Imagine we have an excellent microtonal 7-note scale, such as 7-EDO, mavila[7], or something else. By default, your synth maps these notes linearly and chromatically across your MIDI keyboard. Press the C key, and at the same time press the key which is 7 steps above it (that’s a G). You will hear an octave! That’s incredibly jarring, because we expect to hear an octave from C to C, not from C to G.

Linear mapping of a 7-note scale on to chromatic keys:

The scale degrees in red are octaves. NOT fifths!

Custom mappings help to make a regular pattern that is much more familiar and easy to navigate:

The diagrams above should make it obvious that linear mapping is a problem. With linear mapping, fingering becomes irregular as you go up and down by aural octaves. For a 7 note scale, we can simply skip out the 5 black keys to get a regular, repeating pattern.

Start off by loading a 7 note scale into Scala. I simply typed ‘equal 7’ to get 7-EDO.

Then go to Edit > Edit Mapping (Alt+P).

The mapping should repeat every 12 notes on our keyboard, so set Size to 12. Remember that’s 7 notes from our scale, plus 5 black notes we’ll skip out, totalling 12.

Set a value for Formal octave degree, which is 7 in this case.

Fill out the remaining fields as shown below:

If you don’t see the fields at the bottom, make sure you enter a value for Size. Scala will then create the empty fields for you automatically, and you can type in the scale degrees that you want for your mapping.

Note that we’re skipping the sharps/blacks, so you can leave those fields blank. Or if you’re like me, you will see this as an opportunity to enter duplicate notes and create a sweet sounding pentatonic mode from the main scale.

Once you’re done, click Save As and save the resulting mapping file. Scala mappings are saved in .kbm format. The great thing about this, is that you can mix and match your .kbm mapping files with .scl tuning files that you have collected. So if you have several .scl tuning files with 7 notes, then you can use this same .kbm mapping file on all of them.

While you have a scale and a mapping loaded at the same time, now is a good time to export your tuning for softsynths, or relay it to hardware synths. It feels much easier to play with the new mapping.

How to map a 12-note subset of a larger tuning

Now imagine that we have a tuning much larger than 12 notes, and we want to select just the notes that we want to map on the keyboard. For example, let’s try the calm vibes of 31-EDO. Just for context here is some music written in 31-EDO. 31 is a very nice meantone temperament, very close to quarter-comma meantone.

Here is how 31-EDO would be linearly mapped to a keyboard:

I don’t know about you, but my hands aren’t wide enough to hit that octave.

Seriously this is just ridiculous. 31 notes is too many for most musicians to keep track of, so let’s just pick 12 notes for our mapping:

The 12 notes that I selected give a quasi-12-equal. But you should feel free to choose your own notes and experiment with what your ear likes.

Go to Edit > Clear Mapping to reset your mapping back to normal, then go to Edit > Edit Mapping to open the keyboard mapping dialog. Fill in the Size (12) and Formal octave degree (31) then enter the scale degree for each note of the mapping.

As before, now is a good time to save your .kbm mapping file, and load it up on a synth of your choice.

How to map a 12-note subset of a larger tuning (alternative method)

Instead of using Scala’s keyboard mapping functions, we could do it with the mode command instead. The mode command lets you choose a subset of notes from your currently loaded scale, and then it deletes the remaining notes.

The end result would be a single .scl file with the extra notes removed, instead of the usual .scl and .kbm pair (containing the full gamut of notes plus tuning information). You might use this method if your synth supports .scl files but not .kbm files.

Imagine that we want to recreate the above quasi-12-equal mode from 31-EDO. Just type these commands into Scala:

equal 31 mode 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3 2 show

You’ll get the following output from Scala:

0: 1/1 0.000000 unison, perfect prime 1: 116.129 cents 116.129032 2: 232.258 cents 232.258065 3: 309.677 cents 309.677419 4: 425.806 cents 425.806452 5: 503.226 cents 503.225806 6: 619.355 cents 619.354839 7: 735.484 cents 735.483871 8: 812.903 cents 812.903226 9: 929.032 cents 929.032258 10: 1006.452 cents 1006.451613 11: 1122.581 cents 1122.580645 12: 2/1 1200.000000 octave

Note that, when you use the mode command, you enter the difference (in scale degrees) between successive notes of the scale. The table below shows you how the difference between scale degrees relates to the scale degrees themselves.

Scale degrees 0 3 6 8 11 13 16 19 21 24 26 29 31 Difference 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3 2

You should also notice that 3 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 = 31. The sum of these digits must be equal to the octave degree, which is 31 in this case. Otherwise, the mode command will give you an error: Scale and mode size are unequal.

Further exercises