Seems like a practical device, and surprising indeed that there is no commercially available equivalent.
As someone suffering from (self-diagnosed) red light syndrome and lack of practice, I tend to produce the best improvisations before I hit that inspiration-killing record button in DAW or audio recorder. Having a MIDI capture device always on could help me capture all that (and subsequently use in production, or more likely realize that I am no genius even with recording light off).
I can also see a MIDI recorder useful in DAWless modular synth setups and/or live gigs.
One feature I could see being important is a hardware button to place a marker while recording, to make it easier to locate parts of longer performances.
> To keep things simple, because we’re only writing this code for some debugging (and maybe fun), we’ll use the standard twelve tone equal temperament tuning
Okay I'm half tempted to leave it as Tuscan (but only half =)
Adding a button that you can press to inject a MIDI marker is an interesting idea, for my own use (once I turn it into a non-breadboard version) is to just hang off the back of my controller so that wouldn't be a convenient place to interact with it, but if you have it just sitting in reach, I can see that being super useful.
As for tuning: there are many, but it really depends on what you're playing, so if the arduino was driving its own little mini-synth, you'd probably want to add some tunings that would allow you to at least match the various tunings you'll find in any custom-tunable stage piano. Being able to set the tuning to Well Tempered or Werckmeister when your controller or Piano VSTi is currently set to that would be rather convenient, but only if we're not listening to Piezo beeps =)
There are many other tunings you could use, Just Intonation, for one example. Although I agree it’s strange to say that. Like saying ‘We’re driving there, in a car, with four wheels.’
Most of them sound bad because you --through no fault of your own-- have no idea how to use them, and no idea how to listen to them. Very few people are exposed to anything beyond ET and even when they are, they are rarely taught their historical use, with pieces appropriate to them, so that they can learn to understand them, and through understanding, appreciate and possibly even use them.
There's almost nothing about tuning systems that is inherently bad "because our ears", the closest to a real argument you could make is that resonant harmonics are good, but that doesn't really help us much: natural harmonics only give us a "good" tuning for one specific root note, and leaves so many notes unavailable that you'd be locked into a single natural harmonic key. Whatever pitch you come up with for any other note really is just an arbitrary (although usually at least informed by something), choice.
(Heck, starting with harmonics is itself already a choice, there is literally no reason to use that if your music is locally intervalic, where you don't get to skip up and down by intervals of an octave or more)
There's so many centuries of documented musical history, most of it not (to use a phrase that's rapidly become cliche) part of 18th century western musical canon. What you grew up with is what you're used to, and thus is what you're comfortable with, and thus is what you consider "good".
So be careful calling things you're not used to "bad": you're not used to it, so it's almost guaranteed to make you uncomfortable, and you'll be tempted to call it bad, and you should always try to catch yourself before that last step =)
> Although I agree it’s strange to say that. Like saying ‘We’re driving there, in a car, with four wheels.’
I don’t think it’s strange, I was legitimately curious about author’s subjective take as to which tuning is best under circumstances where key isn’t known in advance. JI is tricky since it highly depends on the key, and ET doesn’t sound good[0].
[0] It’s ironic a lot of modern popular music is very limited in tonal range, yet uses ET where a lot of micro-dissonances were introduced specifically to support complicated progressions and modulations without re-tuning a piano.
Pretty easy to add "more buttons" as long as there's free pins, and writing a marker is a single message, so most of the time went into "checking which DAWs correctly import markers" and writing the tutorial bit for it =)
As someone suffering from (self-diagnosed) red light syndrome and lack of practice, I tend to produce the best improvisations before I hit that inspiration-killing record button in DAW or audio recorder. Having a MIDI capture device always on could help me capture all that (and subsequently use in production, or more likely realize that I am no genius even with recording light off).
I can also see a MIDI recorder useful in DAWless modular synth setups and/or live gigs.
One feature I could see being important is a hardware button to place a marker while recording, to make it easier to locate parts of longer performances.
> To keep things simple, because we’re only writing this code for some debugging (and maybe fun), we’ll use the standard twelve tone equal temperament tuning
Question: which tuning would you use otherwise?
> Tuscan DR-05
Looks like a funny autocorrection artifact.