Toad,

If there is anything we love at Mudcat, it is a gracious appology, although I think we love the detailed information on what others are doing (which you have also provided) even more...

I may have been a little hard on you, at that,,,sorry,..

Anyway, I appreciate your problem--I do a bit of recording with the keyboard, and I hate the tempered sound that you get on the strings, you loose a lot of the fullness that you wanted the strings for in the first place--

Although I haven't done it (yet) it is possible to set patches for just about any system of intonation that you want--

You can also use the bar to shift pitch on individual notes (which is how Arabic musicians manage to use western synthesizer keyboard) but I have done really well with brass and string sounds with the simple trick of using a guitar synthesizer--you get great shifts of pitch in the note decay, and you can bend the notes to get whatever alterations in pitch that you'd like, as well.

I recall having seen some sort of converter pick up that could be attached to a violin to convert the output to MIDI--then you could do whatever needed to without having to fiddle around (sorry for the pun)