L’il Miss' Scale Oven™ Scale Analysis and Editing Tool

Computer Aided Intonation Design LMSO X is fully native for OS X: Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and Leopard. Works with both USB MIDI port Macs and older serial ones CoreMIDI (OS X) compatibility assures smooth studio integration Responsive, Personal Email Technical Support 30-Day Complete Satisfaction Guarantee Only $165 Free Shipping within U.S.

Create, use and play scales that sound good — easily. Ethnic tunings, nonoctave scales, natural intonations, experimental and historical scales — all treated uniformly. Real-time retuning of wide variety of instruments through MIDI.   Numerical editing and Graphical display of scale using equal-divisions, cents and ratios. See the intervals you are playing as you play them. Create and interact with tunings just like with an acoustic instrument, by ear, even tweaking intonation of individual notes during a live performance if desired. Analyze consonance and dissonance of a scale using a perceptual model of hearing. Iteratively and Interactively Quantize scales to closest matches of just and equal-temperaments within desired degree of match using the intuitive IQ Scale Editing Module. Knead & Fold Kitchen Appliance — the easy to use Scale Editing Module for effortlessly creating meantone, MOS, and linear scales. Waffle Iron — fun and versatile appliance for making symmetrical just intonation and rational scales, tonality diamonds, and more. Tonic Shifter — useful interactive graphical modulation appliance. Shaker — when you want to escape from too digital a sound, this appliance adds a touch of organic analog realism to your scales.   Big library of scales included. Imports popular scale file formats like Scala. Huge variety of output formats. Create new timbres that are spectrally matched to a scale.   Polyphonic virtual keyboard enables you to play scales and music without needing to turn on an external keyboard. Communicates with hardware synths through any MIDI interface and with sequencers and softsynths directly using inter-application MIDI communication. Hardware synths with sysex retuning support are retuned directly using their own protocols through MIDI. Instruments which are not retunable can now be retuned through MIDI by using the powerful Nuscale real-time tuning module which can tune multiple instruments at once to the same or different tunings, as well as adding new expressive musical capabilities. Tuning support for Logic 7, Kyma, TimewARP2600, Metasynth™, Pluggo™, Max/MSP™, BitHeadz Unity, NI Reaktor™, NI Absynth 2™ and many more. Retunes many many softsynths and samplers, even those in Reason™, Ableton Live, and Kontakt™.   Zone Manager — master keyboard controller for creating splits and layers, and changing them in real time with foot pedals. Universal Tuning Format Translator — Never worry about tuning format compatibility again! Read, write, convert practically anything! Cupcake Microtonal Synthesizer — a 48 part multitimbral, 64 voice synthesizer. Cupcake accepts sequenced tuning changes, separate scales per part, and real time tuning and patch changes without glitching. Now included with LMSO!

 

What you can do with LMSO

You can... Cook up moods and beats for gamelan instruments, pan pipes, bouzoukis, ouds, log drums, mbiras, harpsichords, recorders, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdys, kotos, or any other ethnic instrument using accurate native tunings that really put the sound together and make it come alive with an authentic taste.

Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven is regarded by musicians the world over as the best tuning software available. LMSO generates tunings for musical instruments, evaluates their sonance across a given timbre, and much much more. Each tuning is baked in an Oven.

Put that Scale Recipe in the Oven, specify the type of Frosting, press Bake and pow! Your Box is retuned with a fresh new tuning, ready to be eaten up with funky new riffs as delicious harmonic aromas waft out of the studio-kitchen and all around your house, barn, warehouse or loft.

Instrument Support

The Li’l Miss changes what is possible You’ll understand the primal energy of tunings in a new way. You will be working with and applying tunings to your music productively and easily right away. The way you think about composition will never be the same, nor will the way you work as a composer. The power you wield as an artist to lead the listener to new states of lucidity and levels of emotional energy will be increased exponentially. Everything changes now — starting with the unlimited artistic potential simmering within the Li’l Miss, ready to be exploded into the world through your work. Stand by for a conceptual leap in tuning awareness as new powers to change the world through your art become yours for the taking.

Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven (LMSO) runs on the Mac and tunes more instruments than any other software in the world, including pro Yamaha, Ensoniq and MIDI Tuning Standard compatible musical instruments. This includes the Yamaha DX7 w/E!, DX7II, DX11, TX802, TX81Z, SY77, TG77, SY99, VL1, and VL7; the Ensoniq EPS, EPS+, ASR-10, ASR-X; Marion Prosynth, E-mu Proteus/1, Proteus/2, Proteus 1000 & 2000 and relatives, and all instruments that understand the MIDI Tuning Standard (there are a lot of these out there), such as many E-mu synthesizers. A detailed list of instruments supported may be found here.

In the soft synth world, LMSO provides unique microtonal support for a number of synths which were formerly quite difficult to retune, such as UI Metasynth, Pluggo, Max/MSP, and NI Reaktor.

LMSO also supports all explicitly retunable softsynths compatible with the Mac that I know about, such as the FM7, Absynth 2, Pro-53, CronoX 2, Albino 2, Cameleon 5000, Cube and Tera 2.

In addition to this, LMSO is even so powerful it can retune many many software synths that theoretically cannot be retuned, such as the NI Kontakt sampler, as well as all the synths and samplers included with the very popular Propellerhead Reason. Imagine what you can do, for example, by using LMSO to tune Reason’s samplers to authentic ethnic tunings!

LMSO can also retune many hardware synths not listed here that were never designed to be retunable. This really opens up new possibilities.

Please note that if you have an instrument that is retunable but you don’t see it listed here, contact me and I will be happy to research it for you. Many times, I have been able to add new formats to the program in the time it takes for payment to be received. In these cases there’s only been one time where it didn’t work pretty much right away and in that case it ended up being a case of the manufacturer implementing a tuning code incorrectly, which I was fortunately able to put in a workaround for.

Because LMSO uses the industry standard Mac MIDI drivers CoreMIDI for OS X, instruments are selected by the names you have given them. LMSO knows what kind of tuning format each instrument needs and so there is no need to select that separately.

Specifying and manipulating scales

Toss out your calendar... ...and return to primal scales that resonate with your inner spirit and bring into consciousness your hidden emotional energies and experience. Use your music to activate chakras and unstop those energy blockages in the meridians.

Scales are editable in cents, ratios or equal divisions (called srutis in LMSO) units in either absolute or differential format. A graphical display is provided that is capable of indicating the deviation from another scale by the use of a gradient blur. Conversions are provided between any two types of representations and also quantizations can be performed from one space to another. For example, it is possible to quantize an equal temperament 73% of the way towards 21-limit ratio space, or whatever. No specialized theoretical or mathematical knowledge is necessary. This is done interactively with a slider and the graphical display and is quite intuitive.

LMSO can read Scala tuning files (most I believe, though I have not tested all that exist!).

LMSO also uses its own format tuning files normally. These include information about the author of a scale, its date of creation, any scale it might be derived from, keywords, anchor frequency and key, and type of keyboard mapping. All of these things are easily edited and viewed from within the program.

Usability

One nice feature is that anywhere you can enter numbers, you can enter expressions — including many trigonometric and other functions built in. I hate having to grab a calculator to figure out numbers for programs and so I include built in calculators in my applications (Pressing CMD-= visibly reduces any selected mathematical expression). Has nice usability features such as click on any number and press the up and down arrows to increment and decrement the number; do this with shift to move in larger steps, or control to move in smaller steps.

Transmitting and saving scales

Make your audience’s ears twitch from the excitement and anticipation of a tasty treat Start with well-known scales if you want, analyze them, tweak them, make them just right and different enough to give your music that spicy edge.

Tunings can be sent out to external instruments using your MIDI interface, or to other MIDI programs using LMSO’s virtual MIDI ports. They can be saved as a sysex message embedded in a Standard MIDI File (SMF). This file can read into most sequencers, provided that the sequencer can read Standard MIDI Files and supports system exclusive messages, and then you can include tunings in your sequences and change them as part of a composition if you like.

Most formats can be saved as raw MIDI in case you want to use any of the freeware sysex dump programs available instead of LMSO. This can be useful if sharing a tuning with a Mac user who does not have any tuning software.

Also can save scales to a wide and ever-increasing number of specialized and obscure tuning file formats used by various soft synths and analysis programs. This means you only need one program to manage all your scales and all your scales are tuned in a compatible manner.

Most instruments that do not have sysex tuning table support or some other form of tuning support can be retuned via LMSO’s dynamic retuning system Nuscale. Nuscale can simultaneously retune multiple instruments at once to any desired tuning, permits the use of multiple simultaneous tuning layers, allows dynamic modulation for extended just intonation, enables tuning scales by ear while playing, and adds expressive performance features to each instrument.

Mac Compatibility

LMSO X is a fully native OS X application and runs great in Jaguar (10.2), Panther (10.3), Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5).

LMSO X also runs well on Intel Macs using the built-in Rosetta emulator.

Some other Features and notes

Travel to other universes of mood and intonational expression As you conjure up tunings of alien civilizations, creating otherworldly dream music that entrances your listeners and awakens previously unexperienced sensations.

The program is not limited to twelve tones per repeat, nor to a repeat of an octave.

Nor is it limited to a small fixed set of tunings — you can make up your own scales, download scales off the internet, type tunings in from books, and trade scales with friends.

The program is written in C using an object oriented architecture yielding stable code that will continue to be maintained, and is quite fast and responsive.

The graphical displays can be copied to the clipboard then pasted into graphics programs — that’s how I made the scale diagrams in my article on scale stretching in Jacky Ligon’s last ‘Microtonal Activist’ ezine. This can be very helpful in explaining to others about tunings one is using.

Price and Materials

Whatever you choose, it’s up to you Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven gives you the power and control to be the master of your artistic and expressive domain.

The new Version 3.0 of LMSO is released and shipping. The retail price is $165 which is a tremendous value as it represents several thousand hours of skilled engineering development time. To make it easy, the cost of postage and handling is included. (When shipped to addresses within the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Greece, Finland, Norway, Japan; other locations I might have to check first.)

LMSO is quite robust and usable as I have been developing her over a period of eleven years now and use her all the time myself in my own compositional work and research.

Distributed in a nice box on a CD with the program, video tutorials, current manuals, and a large library of ethnic, experimental and historical tunings to get started with.

Reviews

My customers so far have been extremely satisfied, finding the program to be fun, easy to use, versatile, and the best Mac tuning software. Here are some comments:

“It’s a brilliant piece of software!” — Juhani Nuorvala, Composer, Finland

“I am astonished. You can define scales as cents, ratios, hertz, srutis, as scales that repeat at the octave, that don’t repeat, and that repeat within any other interval. It’s software conceived by a microtonalist, anticipating anything a microtonalist may want to try out. Conlon Nancarrow used to muse regretfully about how much easier his player piano studies would have been to write if he had had today’s sequencing software, and I feel like I just gained a similar advantage in mid-career. Never again will I have to perform that tedious task between conception and audition. Microtonal music just got easier to make than it probably ought to be.” — Kyle Gann, Composer, Teacher, Writer, New York

“I love it. Thank you, thank you for your beautiful software.” — Ellen Fullman, Berkeley

“I used LMSO on a short film called “Spilt Milk”, this was a comedy martial arts movie. It was shot on a shoe-string budget, but the director told me that he felt the music and sound effects were so good they could have been from any cinema release film. LMSO allowed me to dial up traditional Japanese scales that gave my music the traditional and authentic feel I was looking for. In the past I had access to the sounds of traditional instruments, but now with LMSO I have access to the scales those instruments use. LMSO is a fantastic tool for any artist serious about pushing the boundaries in that most neglected of musical domains, PITCH! I would recommend LMSO unreservedly.” — Justin White, Sydney, Australia

“LMSO is my first choice of software. I use it uniquely to audition tunings for my work.” — James Wyness, Scotland

“Your software is fantastic, a completely worthwhile investment for me, and I have been using it or its results practically every day since receiving it. LMSO is a perfect example of what computers ought to be used for. In a corporate dominated world, such freak examples of creativity shouldn’t statistically exist at all — they only exist on the fringes. Your program is that most precious kind of thing — something done as a labor of love, by a genuinely creative person deeply immersed in a multi-disciplinary art/craft. Even the simplest things I have done with LMSO have spared me countless hours of misery and physical/mental wear. These simple functions, which LMSO performed perfectly the minute I installed it, along with the much more complex things it does that I haven’t gotten around to yet, must have taken many years of study and creative energy and troubleshooting and fatigue. Your program is far beyond a mere “product” — for those of us who are swallowed up by fascination with tunings, LMSO is more like an act of long term public service, stretching beyond the short term future.” — Michael Henderson, Fermented Music, Arizona

“Nuscale has been working very well with my softsynths, and the Kontakt scripting function is incredibly easy and useful.  Thanks again for your fantastic software!” — Gregory White, Liquid Life Music, Boston

“Before I was using LMSO, the only grammatical tool I felt I had available to me to create musical phrases was the full stop, but now I feel completely unrestricted in terms of the grammar that I can use, and my potential for expression has increased almost infinitely.” — Mark Burton, England

Satisfaction Guarantee

I offer a 30 day total satisfaction guarantee (minus shipping charges of course) which I think is a good thing to have for any software!

Product Support

I include product support and assistance with getting things up and running or even in setting up scales if desired. I want to provide a completely satisfactory experience for all composers, musicians, and theorists who license LMSO.

I use LMSO myself in my own work as a musician all the time, which means that I continue to add features and capabilities to LMSO and support for new instruments. The Li’l Miss is not going away nor is she stuck in the mud. She is part of the future. Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven is an indispensable compositional and performance tool without equal. Patrons supporting LMSO do so knowing that their support is not just appreciated but is an investment that helps them play a part in the future of music, a thrilling future we all have a chance to be a part in forming through works of astonishing music created and performed using the incredible power of pitch.

Ordering and Inquiries

Of course any questions you have about the program’s uses or features or more details about instrument compatibility, inquire and I’ll try to answer them.

If interested in ordering a copy, just click here for ordering information. We are in Tennessee and normally ship the program within 3 business days of receiving a check or money order. Credit card and paypal can be used by purchasing from the Red Barn Goat Farm storefront at the Kagi store. These purchases are then drop shipped from here, also normally within 3 business days. International shipments can take a day or two more to process.

Thanks for checking it out! I look forward to hearing from you.

Where do I go next?

1	Order LMSO
2	Tutorials
3	Instruments
4	Scale Gallery
5	Feature Excerpts
6	The Mission of the Miss