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Can you elaborate? Just to make your comment less of a useless knee-jerk reaction but rather a discussion started for someone else.
If they did, why did they hold it back just to speak so contemptuously of a subject that is actually interesting and reasonably well explained?
The most guitars today are still made in the style of the 1950s Gibsons and Fenders, including the neck and tuner layout. Most guitar buyers focus on the aesthetic and not the quality. I switched to a headless guitar where the tuners are at the bridge and it has a fanned fretboard giving the strings more natural tensions, the thing stays in tune and is intonated at the frets extremely well.
Absurd. A guitar within tolerance is in tune. It's a fundamental feature of the instrument. Not a flaw. Music doesn't live in an abstract realm of perfections, it is an expression however formed. The fact that we can measure it is one thing. But the music or instruments do not need conform to discrete measurements to satisfy. I know engineers hate this, but ask any musician. It's like arguing that a sitar and its sca…
I agree with this in spirit, but there are practical ramifications of getting the frequency domain wrong. The human brain is very particular in this space. Even for completely untrained listeners. It's nothing like the human visual system. You're working on timescales measured in microseconds with auditory signals. Even where the instruments are physically positioned on stage is significant. Getting their pitch slightly wrong can be catastrophic.
> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…
> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…
> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…
But for instruments with fixed pitches, like guitar or pianos,12 equal temperament is the best compromise to be able to play in all keys.
> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…
You can. It’s called adaptive tuning, or dynamic just intonation, and it happens naturally for singers with no accompanying instruments.
It’s impractical on a real instrument, but there’s a commercial synthesiser implementation called hermode tuning.
You’re trading one problem for another, though. No matter how you do this, you will either have occasional mis-tuning or else your notes will drift.