Electronic Alphorn Sounds – Update for Ableton Live 12

A few years ago I wrote a post here post about how to create electronic alphorn sounds. Microtuning has now arrived in the mainstream. With the latest release of Ableton Live 12, it is also possible to load tunings programmed in Scala directly and apply them to a variety of samplers and synthesizers. For example, you can play back midi files ( directly available with Robert Körnli’s sheet music, others easily created from the MuseScore files) so that the alphorn fa sounds like a real alphorn fa!

To simplify things for you you, I have created ascl files for F and F sharp alphorns and C Büchels. The files can simply be dragged onto the tuning window and the tuning of the instruments is miraculously adjusted to the natural scale.

You can download the ZIP archive with the different tunings here. You will find tunings for horns in F, F sharp and C, each with and without transposition (with transposition: a played C sounds like an F / without transposition: the F sounds like an F and the corresponding alphorn-Fa would be 6 semitones (B) above/below). Each tuning is also programmed for reference tone a1=440, 442 and 444.

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