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Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

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Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#41

Post by im3w1l »

parenthesis wrote: post #31
madhadron wrote: post #9

From the first post in the series: > We now use the so called equal temperament system... Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak. Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gu…

> Unless I'm playing a piano ... Actually, the way a piano is tuned is pretty funky. The rigidity of the strings means the higher 'harmonics' of a note get sharper and sharper. If you tune the fundamentals to exact equal temperament a piano sounds out of tune, because the upper partials of lower notes are pretty sharp versus the lower partials of higher notes. Hence the frequences of the fundamentals are stretched ou…

> This is why you hire a piano tuner to tune your piano.

Idk... I think it's more about the hassle. People I've known let their piano get really out of tune (like we are talking a quarter tone off for some tones "just avoid those"), to the point where their own amateurish tuning would be a big improvement, before they call the tuner over.

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#42

Post by mikorym »

I was expecting a bit more category theory. But I was glad to see that he alludes to the duality of minor chords and major chords.

A simple way to look at it is like this: Pick two notes, i.e., an interval.

Then pick a note in the middle of the two notes. The dual chord is the one where you swap the up and down chromatic distances. Then if you happened to pick a 5th interval, and you happened to pick the major 3rd as middle note, then the minor is dual to it.

But you can go further. Pick the octave and choose the 5th now as your middle note. Then the 4th is dual to this.

You can drop the chromatic condition and work in a key with a scale and things like that. Also, the 12 chromatic notes form a group with inverses as duals. Then the 5th is dual to the 4th, but now the 3rd will be dual to the 6th—equivalent to the interval construction where you take the octave above.

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#43

Post by mellavora »

nicetryguy wrote: post #12
madhadron wrote: post #9

From the first post in the series: > We now use the so called equal temperament system... Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak. Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gu…

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that. I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rar…

Another upvote for modular synth. Andrew (https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/) has some amazingly cool devices.

Chaotic orbits for "waves", running audio through cmos gates to produce pitch changes, running ADSRs through a filter to produce more random envelopes,... and he seems to come up with new module ideas monthly if not more often.

My most favorite recent module of his is based on cellular automata.

https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/cellular-automata

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#44

Post by sk0g »

japanoise wrote: post #32
Tade0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Those who play electric guitars with distortion prefer to approach Just Intonation(for a given key) as it doesn't have so much intermodulation. There is an attempt to tune guitars close to equal temperament trademarked as True Temperament: https://www.truetemperament.com/faq/ I for one am happy when my 12th and 24th frets are in tune. Solos sound off and weak if these two don't hold.

To use computing slang to talk about music: this is just ricing. At best you'll sound out of tune with the rest of the band, at worst you'll run into wolf intervals and other issues with just intonation. This touches on the biggest reason we stick with 12-tone equal temparament in the West: social reasons. Having a standard means we can play together, in groups or at jams, without having to negotiate which tuning sys…

Is ricing a computer term? Thought it was a (funny|racist) reference to JDM cars and how engrossing a hobby tweaking those cars can be.

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#45

Post by [deleted] »

nicetryguy wrote: post #12
madhadron wrote: post #9

From the first post in the series: > We now use the so called equal temperament system... Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak. Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gu…

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that. I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rar…

[deleted]

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#46

Post by adelrune »

nicetryguy wrote: post #12
madhadron wrote: post #9

From the first post in the series: > We now use the so called equal temperament system... Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak. Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gu…

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that. I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rar…

William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html

Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#47

Post by mellavora »

nicetryguy wrote: post #5
dehrmann wrote: post #2

> The first such transformation is to lower the third by one step to obtain a minor triad. For some reason, we perceive minor chords as sad or melancholy, sometimes a bit whiny. I'd love to hear more on "some reason." In a way, it's so arbitrary, and maybe it's a cultural bias, but so sad. And the minor iv chord, so sad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQFtvAfHndE , right when he sings "when September ends," but ther…

> I'd love to hear more on "some reason." Modern science has no idea! I've researched a fair bit. We don't know how the brain intreprets frequency combinations or why different ones sound good or bad together or evoke certain moods. Math can explain harmonics and the circle of fifths and how to assemble keys and modes, sure, but no one knows the Why or How of the internals between the ears. It is just cultural bias a…

former brain scientist weighing in here. the brain seems to do some operations which resemble Fourier transforms. We also use logrithmic scaling. Combine those two and you get a lot of the harmonics.

So yes, you ask a good question, but in fact there is some knowledge of the hardware which supports the empirical observations of musicians and composers.

and yes, music is still a mystery. There is a lot more going on than scale, pitch, and harmonics.

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#48

Post by analog31 »

madhadron wrote: post #9

From the first post in the series: > We now use the so called equal temperament system... Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak. Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gu…

Sometimes the viola da gamba is set up with double frets to handle playing in multiple keys without retuning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VpxeGb3qZA

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#49

Post by ubercow13 »

adelrune wrote: post #46
nicetryguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that. I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rar…

William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.

"Three Ears" looks like the one most relevant to this discussion and is luckily still there.

Re: Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third

#50

Post by moron4hire »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #33
nicetryguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that. I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rar…

Microtonal music really isn't hard to find. It's just not very popular, because it's too niche for mainstream listeners. And most popular VSTs - Serum, Pigments, Massive, Phaseplant - all use wavetables and not 'the same old square and saw waves.' Modern pop really isn't any more generic than 30s/40s jazz, 50s rock and roll and bubblegum, and so on. That's why it's called popular music and not experimental music.

Modern pop is more generic because the song you hear in the recording is not really played on real instruments or sang by a real person. The samples that were used to create it might have been, but they've been completed deconstructed and then reassembled in ProTools.

Even considering the stuff that Queen did for tracks like Bohemian Rhapsody where they used dozens of layered tracks isn't really the same thing. They used that layering to create a sound that wasn't possible, otherwise. But the tracks themselves were made from recording real people playing real instruments.

Modern pop, in comparison, is just about commoditization, slapping out a track at as little cost as possible. Everything gets lined up on a rigid beat grid, neutering any texture or feel in the song.

Rick Beato has a great video on what exactly is going on and why there actually is a significant difference with "post-ProTools" pop from previous years. https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc

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