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.
I'm not seeing any dead links there? That page has always been a listing of the mp3 files on the physical CD that comes with his book, only some of which were ever put online. BTW, Sethares' research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares goes way beyond tuning music to simple ratios. His whole book is about working with a model of sounds being "in tune" with one another that doesn't just boil down to that.
A bunch of the examples lead to a 404. Also his research is really mind blowing stuff, I was in disbelief when I heard the first few examples.
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.
Maybe I'm showing my power level a bit here. To me it means "tweaking something's aesthetics in a way that doesn't improve, perhaps even degrades, performance".
Blues, not metal or rock, is absolutely full of microtonal wails and chirps and wiggles and vibrato, and fret pressure very much gives way to a whole new way to think about the strings; not something to press down like a button at exactly perpendicular force to delicately or firmly contact the frets, but strings are something to be grabbed, ripped, whipped, twisted behind the frets. Add to that a hard attack can whip…
Not rock? I guess we'd have to know your definition of "rock"... but if you allow "classic" or "progressive" rock into your view, then a lot of those players utilize every aspect of expression on the guitar. And how about the whammy bar? Maybe guitarists aren't consciously using it to untemper their intervals, but to say "rock guitar" is locked to tempered tuning is incorrect.
Sure, I love gritty, classic rock. To the extent that rock was influenced by blues, it has that voice to it. But rock is dead. It died sometime in the 1990s, unfortunately. Metal survived somehow...I'm not really a metal fan, especially very technical stuff, because I find it very...masturbatory. The theory is that the guitar is not an instrument, it's an antenna. It picks up on the energy and mood of the player, all the way down to the stance, the heartbeat, the expression on your face. If you see players like Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Page--and thankfully now there are so many hours of footage of them at our fingertips--they throw their entire body into the performance, completely unafraid. They aren't staring at the fretboard and twiddling out some ridiculously complicated technical thing that (some believe) requires the perfect 45-degree neck angle, a highly mounted guitar, a severe fret-hand reacharound with the thumb on the back of the neck...no, those three I mentioned play mostly by feel. They are hardly looking at the neck, ever, instead enthralled in the whole experience, like a Tennis player watching the ball, not their racket. Contrast them with someone like John Petrucci, an extremely intelligent and cerebral player, with a vast knowledge of musical theory and absolutely excellent technical skills--but then he stands there on stage like he's jerking off with tweezers. (Pardon the imagery, but I can't unsee this after a friend explained it this way to me!)
I'm guessing that you learned guitar before piano? My first instrument was piano and I don't really think about hand shape when I play chords on it. My internal visualization of music is primarily founded on a piano keyboard with musical staves as secondary. I will say that playing multiple musical instruments gives the same kind of multiple ways of looking at a thing that multiple programming languages does. One of…
My first instrument was also piano (classical). I never really thought of hand shape while playing chords either, but I understand the parent comment - since your hand position does change, it makes the absolute key much more important, and it makes it more difficult to see the relative jumps. I don't think I ever had a good feel for how chords relate to each other before I started playing the accordion recently. On…
> It's also arranged in the circle of fifths
So that's why the accordian player I walk past on the promenade always sounds like he's playing Autumn Leaves: circle of fourths/fifths chord progressions are very natural to play on the instrument.
(Of course, he's not playing Autumn Leaves; that's just the first tune I think of with that chord progression; but there are zillions. The Beatles' You Never Give Me Your Money, and I Will Survive are a couple of other famous popular music ones.)
My first instrument was also piano (classical). I never really thought of hand shape while playing chords either, but I understand the parent comment - since your hand position does change, it makes the absolute key much more important, and it makes it more difficult to see the relative jumps. I don't think I ever had a good feel for how chords relate to each other before I started playing the accordion recently. On…
> It's also arranged in the circle of fifths So that's why the accordian player I walk past on the promenade always sounds like he's playing Autumn Leaves: circle of fourths/fifths chord progressions are very natural to play on the instrument. (Of course, he's not playing Autumn Leaves; that's just the first tune I think of with that chord progression; but there are zillions. The Beatles' You Never Give Me Your Money…
And conversely, some songs that I wrote for piano can have crazy jumps on an accordion.
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.
I have an electric, but, yeah, point taken. And half the time I have it set as a harpsichord anyway.
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 thought you were going to say you a violinist—that's the best example of perfect 4ths and 5ths that you can integrate with a band or orchestra that may include a normal 440 Hz A piano with equal temperament based on sqrt(2,12).
I am a violinist. :) That's my primary instrument. But even there you don't tune to perfects fifths all the time. In string quartets you tune the bottom C of the cello up a bit and the E's of the violins down a bit. But if you're playing with a piano in, say, a piano quintet, you generally play equal temperament with the piano.
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
Interesting. I never had a problem with adjusting my pitch on the viol when I was playing that, even with single frets.
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…
But given the frets are placed to divide the length of the string in a specific place, you're aiming to play equal temperament, right? You're using that system on a typical guitar, even if the sounds don't match exactly. Of course it's not going to be perfect, but it's still closer to 12TET-with-noise than some specific mediaeval tuning.
I wouldn't say that you aim to play equal temperament. More that it's the base structure you deviate from. I think my real point is that on most instruments you don't play only twelve tones. You play a whole lot more that get grouped into twelve groups.