India Series
Scales for Indian Music
I have gone through the India Series User Manual (PDF) several times, and also tried things with India Series on Kontakt Player. I am not sure I am understanding the paradigm and how to get certain basic thing accomplished.
First a Few Questions: All Pages ref to India Series Manual
https://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/ni_media/downloads/manuals/spotlight_collection/India_Manual_English_29_06_2021.pdf
a) Customizing Scales Page 27
For clarity I will spell out the context
Instrument: Bansuri
Tuning: Scale Tuning
4-South Indian scales 2 -> Shubhapaanthuvarali
Root C
In the scale editor, when you select, say the tab II, you can see in the drop down
Db, D and D#
i) Can you specify the Ornament and Cents Adjustment for each of these? OR
ii) Or you are forcing ONLY one into the scale? and specifying the ornament and cents adjust for that?
I am afraid that the answer is probably (ii)
Anyone who knows Shubha Panthuvarali knows that all the three notes are used in the raga, with "D" not a Note that can be Rested On.
b) Such things occur in many Indian Ragas - I will leave that out here for now.
c) So What I really need is an ability to select Equal Tuning and specify adjustments to all the
12 notes (not just for 8 of them). If I select CHROMATIC as the base, this whole Customizing Scales is disabled :-(
d) The following table provides the lower and high ends for each of the notes in terms of cents relative to equal temperament.
C S 0
C# R1 90-112 cents
D R2, G1 182-204
D# G2, R3 294-316
E G3 386-408
F M1 498-520
F# M2 590-610
G P 702
A# D1 792-814
A D2, N1 884-906
B# N2, D3 996-1018
B N3 1088-1110
Thus C# adjustment in cents can be in the range
of -10 and +12 depending on the raga.
A good default adjusted scale that can be used for many ragas is
0, 10, 4, -6, 8, -2, 10, 2, -8, 6, -4, 10
d) How do I create/assign these pitch corrections in Kontakt/India? and play the keyboard in just GUIDE mode?
e) I thought may be I could create a new .nka file?
Found that these are plain editable text files. Nice.
Fyi, Here is the content of
".... \NI\India\Library Data\Scales\4 - South Indian Scales 2\45 Shubhapantuvarali.nka"
---- ignore this line ---------
%single_scale_preset
0
0
1
1
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
------------- ignore this line -----
How do I interpret the contents of this file?
So I could create my own default scale files?
I look forward to hearing from folks, who are familiar with these mechanisms.
Thanks Sri.
P.S. I had raised these for discussion, ~3 years ago, but those threads have sort of disappeared. And my NI/Discovery Series set still remains unused so far, due to this and many such other issues.
I also want to point out one other major issue -- Pitch bend range is limited to plus/minus 2 on the UI? Rather strange.. Does this also apply to MIDI inputs? Is there a menu for setting the Pitch Bend Range?
