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Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

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Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#121

Post by markrages »

ses1984 wrote: post #120
jMyles wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. ...is this correct? You can say this about any oscillating phenomenon - that doesn't mean it's not 'real'. The "squiggles" are an artifact of the frequency of the string and the scan rate of the rolling shutter. You'll also see artifacting from a global shutter camera, where the "squiggles" will be an artifact…

How could you tell the note by looking at a string? Unless you’re talking by about marking timestamps and measuring the time between peaks. A 42 gauge string tuned to E or D or any other note are going to look basically the same.

GP is talking about seeing the string oscillations alias against the 30 Hz camera frame rate.

I've never tried it.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#122

Post by dagmx »

busterarm wrote: post #109
semitones wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True temperament solves for a _different_ issue than what OP's post talks about. From the strandberg true temperament page: > Let’s begin by describing the issue with standard equal tempered frets; standard fret spacing is calculated from one single piece of information about the guitar, the scale length. This principle ignores that the frequency of a vibrating string is calculated by three factors: the mass of the s…

TT necks are an absolute waste of money. At least if you went with the Earvana nut you only wasted $5 and the time to replace the thing. I've known a lot of musicians that have used the necks but mainly only while sponsored and none of them prefer them. Big names in the guitar world. You're better off spending that money on a better-constructed guitar. And lessons. So many people mistakenly think that gimmicks will m…

This feels like a really puritanical take on things. Fanned frets and multiscale absolutely help with the playability of an instrument. It’s physics, there’s nothing mystical or gimmicky about it.

Maybe YOU don’t want it, but it prevents strings from going flabby without needing much heavier gauges. Which does help with a wide range of playing styles and genres.

Unless you also believe that all guitars should have a single scale length or something, and a single neck profile and fingerboard radius. Otherwise if you concede that it comes down to feel+preference then there’s no argument to make against multiscale instruments.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#123

Post by dahart »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #88
coliveira wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how good the intonation at the bridge or nut. There's the mathematical fact that we cannot get pure thirds and even fifths in modern equal temperament system. If you have a good ear you'll feel the subtle difference between notes, and they can never get exactly where you want. It's something you have to live with in modern music.

The thing is, unless you're playing with other instruments, no one is forcing you to tune to equal temperament . E.g., it's very common to tune a violin's A string to an A440 reference, then tune the other strings to 3:2 perfect fifths by ear. It just gets more complicated for fretted instruments like the guitar.

Wanting to play in any key and not be locked into a key automatically pushes musicians toward equal temperament, even when playing solo, and even on a violin. Saying no one’s forcing you is technically true but sounds pretty naive, and (forgive the pun) tone deaf to me; there’s no realistic alternative for modern music. Some people do choose to play with other tuning systems on occasion, but there’s a reason why 12 TET is so popular and widespread.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#124

Post by kazinator »

dahart wrote: post #118
kazinator wrote: post #61

There is no way to tune your guitar so that all the successive open fourths (and the one major third) are pure, without the high E being quite off pitch relative to the low one. But, unless you mainly play stacked fourths, why would you make it a requirement? You can, for instance, tune instead to get pure fretted fifths between adjacent strings, and fretted octaves between strings one removed. The real reason you ca…

> You can, for instance, tune instead to get pure fretted fifths between adjacent strings, and fretted octaves between strings one removed. No, you can’t. If you tune so that octaves with one string between are correct everywhere on the neck, that will force the tuning to be 12 tone equal temperament, and a fifth in 12 TET cannot be a perfect fifth.

Frets are already on equal temperament on the vast majority of mainstream guitars; you're not getting away from equal temperament unless all you play is open strings, like a koto/harp.

If octaves are perfect with one string in between, the in between string can be slightly detuned from equal temperament to provide a clean fifth, free of beats. Then it also provides a clean fourth up to the octave. That's a useful thing that will make certain chords sound good.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#125

Post by mauvehaus »

rectang wrote: post #47
Filligree wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 note rather than over an entire song? 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 im…

In addition to singers, adaptive tuning is something which happens naturally for fretless stringed instruments (violin, etc), brass instruments with slides (most prominently the slide trombone but in fact many (most?) others), woodwind instruments where the pitch can be bent like saxophone, and so on. I used to play fretless bass in a garage hip hop troupe that played with heavily manipulated samples that were all ov…

Played trombone many years ago, but never well enough to ever adjust that finely (at least not consciously?). The tuning slide on the third valve on a trumpet usually has a finger fork/loop so that it can be tuned in realtime. I believe the first valve on higher end trumpets similarly has a thumb fork for the same reason.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#126

Post by kazinator »

dahart wrote: post #123
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, unless you're playing with other instruments, no one is forcing you to tune to equal temperament . E.g., it's very common to tune a violin's A string to an A440 reference, then tune the other strings to 3:2 perfect fifths by ear. It just gets more complicated for fretted instruments like the guitar.

Wanting to play in any key and not be locked into a key automatically pushes musicians toward equal temperament, even when playing solo, and even on a violin. Saying no one’s forcing you is technically true but sounds pretty naive, and (forgive the pun) tone deaf to me; there’s no realistic alternative for modern music. Some people do choose to play with other tuning systems on occasion, but there’s a reason why 12 T…

Wanting to change keys freely only pushes fixed-pitch musical instruments toward equal temperament. Since many important instruments are like that, and virtually all instruments that are capable of accurate intonation not relying on ear are like that.

If an ensemble includes instruments that are equal temperament, then the non-fixed-pitched instrumentalists adjust their pitch to sound good with those.

An ensemble consisting only of instruments that can play any interval can change keys by pure intervals.

E.g. switching from the original major key to the relative dominant key can mean changing the root by a pure fifth. In equal temperament, this modulation is done by altering only a single note: sharpening the subdominant. All other notes are from the original scale. If we change key by a pure fifth, that is obviously not so; all notes are detuned off the original scale.

If we change through all the keys along the circle of fifths, perfectly purely, we arrive at the Pythagorean comma: the gap between the destination root and the original.

Another possibility is to progress the roots through the diatonic fifths of the original scale, rather than pure fifths. Like, we start with a pure, just intonated C major, and then change keys through G,D,A,E,B,F#,C#,Ab,Eb,Bb,F back to C using the notes of that pure C major scale, or sharps/flats relative to those. Then we don't run into the Pythagorean comma; but of course all the pure scales we end up using are detuned from C major, and in a different way from following pure fifths.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#127

Post by kazinator »

phkahler wrote: post #110
post-it wrote: post #28

> If you watch slow-motion video of a guitar string vibrating, you’ll see a complex, evolving blend of squiggles. These squiggles are the mathematical sum of all of the string’s different harmonics. This is incorrect. If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. A real slowmo camera will correctly show the entire string vibrating[1]. The rest of the articl…

>> but you can't see harmonics happening to the string. But you absolutely can if you rest a finger on a node and pick it, producing primarily the harmonic. You can even see the lesser vibration at the nodes with your eyes.

If you stretch a rope or chain several meters long, you can simultaneously see the fundamental and first harmonic standing wave.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#128

Post by dahart »

kazinator wrote: post #124
dahart wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can, for instance, tune instead to get pure fretted fifths between adjacent strings, and fretted octaves between strings one removed. No, you can’t. If you tune so that octaves with one string between are correct everywhere on the neck, that will force the tuning to be 12 tone equal temperament, and a fifth in 12 TET cannot be a perfect fifth.

Frets are already on equal temperament on the vast majority of mainstream guitars; you're not getting away from equal temperament unless all you play is open strings, like a koto/harp. If octaves are perfect with one string in between, the in between string can be slightly detuned from equal temperament to provide a clean fifth, free of beats. Then it also provides a clean fourth up to the octave. That's a useful thi…

That’s not very helpful. You can only do that one string, and it breaks the perfect octave starting on the detuned string. As soon as you also try to detune the next string up, you break the octave you started from. This is a house of cards idea that falls apart immediately.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#129

Post by kazinator »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #85
JohnMakin wrote: post #39

I was born with something not quite like perfect pitch, but when something is even slightly off tune it caused physical discomfort for me. My cs department had a cool project class where you built what was basically a raspberry pi with a microcontroller by hand, and you had to use the dumb speaker and controller to make your own music firmware to produce notes. the challenge involved, was basically, the processor’s c…

I've been doing audio software for 25-30 years. I have no idea what sort of synthesis you'd be doing where the processor clock played any roll at all. Waveform synthesis is normally done in buffers (8 to 8192 samples), and the "clocking" to convert the sample stream into an analog waveform is done by the audio interface/DAC, not the CPU. If you were basically implementing a DAC, then yes, the clock would matter a lot…

You've not done it long enough to have worked with machine language programs that used instruction timing to click a speaker.

This worked well in 1980's microcomputers which used an accurate, crystal oscillator clock. IC's like the MOS6502 or Intel 8086 don't have built-in clocking. The boards were large and costly enough to afford a clock; and often it was dual purposed. E.g. in Apple II machines, the master oscillator clock from which the NTSC colorburst clock was derived also supplied the CPU clock.

These processors had no caches, so instructions executed with predictable timing. Every data access or instruction fetch was a real cycle on the bus, taking the same time every time.

Code that arranged not to be interrupted could generate precise signals.

Some microcomputers used software loops to drive serial lines, lacking a UART chip for that. You could do that well enough to communicate up to around 1200 baud.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#130

Post by JohnMakin »

NobodyNada wrote: post #94
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing audio software for 25-30 years. I have no idea what sort of synthesis you'd be doing where the processor clock played any roll at all. Waveform synthesis is normally done in buffers (8 to 8192 samples), and the "clocking" to convert the sample stream into an analog waveform is done by the audio interface/DAC, not the CPU. If you were basically implementing a DAC, then yes, the clock would matter a lot…

> you built what was basically a raspberry pi with a microcontroller by hand, and you had to use the dumb speaker and controller to make your own music firmware to produce notes This sounds like they were most likely bit banging square waves into a speaker directly via a GPIO on a microcontroller (or maybe using a PWM output if they were fancy about it). In that case, the audio frequency will be derived directly from…

yes it was this
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