In a message dated 5/16/00 8:30:17 AM Central Daylight Time, A440A@AOL.COM writes: << << I played with a country guitar player who change his tuning after what key his playing in. It would be intresting to check what he is doing. I asked a classic guitarist if he did the same thing but he said he didn't do it but he tuned the guitar between each tune so he probably changed the temprement not knowing it, just thinking the guitar is out of tune. >> Greetings, If you watch that "country guitar player" closely, you will probably see that he is changing the B string. It is this compromise that usually throws guitarists into tuning hell. >> Some time ago I talked about the way I had discovered that a guitar could be tuned in a Vallotti type or Victorian type Well-Tempered tuning. As expected, there were all kinds of incredulous and outraged responses particularly from a classical guitarist who proclaimed that my idea "wouldn't work". He attempted to "prove" that on paper. Another regular contributor who plays the guitar tuned it according to what I said and proclaimed that the guitar had sounded better being simply out of tune. Now, when I compare this to the 100% and consistently positive response that I get when I tune anyone's guitar this way (the eyes lighting up and widening and the mouth opening with a wide smile) and the responses from this List, I can only conclude what I have known all along: It's the HT's. The very idea that something would be purposefully tuned *unequally* is far too much to accept. It just wouldn't, just couldn't work. No professional musician would ever do it nor accept it, so goes the conventional "wisdom". One day last Summer however, when attending a chamber music concert for which I had tuned the piano, I observed a classical guitarist from New York City do exactly the same thing that I had discovered on my own. He played complex repertoire masterfully. He took several minutes to carefully tune his guitar while the audience waited. What had prompted my discovery was a guitarist who apparently had little idea of how to tune his guitar and who was a cast member by default (he was the only one they could get) in a local opera company's production of The Man of La Mancha whom I helped. He played the entire production in this tuning/temperament. His sound was clear, on pitch and very professional sounding. The six string guitar's notes are E2 A2 D3 G3 B3 E4. In ET, each of these 4ths would be 2 cents wide. If you tuned each one 4 cents wide, this would cause the G3-B3 3rd and the D3-B3 6th to beat very gently, at about or the same rate as the 4ths, just like in the Vallotti Temperament. All chords in the simple keys with combinations of open and fretted strings will have a pleasing, harmonious sound which everyone finds agreeable. Chords played by fretting in the remote keys will have the fast and vibrant beating normally associated with those keys. In the Man of La Mancha, tunes such as "Little Bird, Little Bird" in the key of G sounded beautifully harmonious while the imitation Flamenco guitar sounds in Bb and Ab minor had that very dark sound of the remote minor key. I have also heard many other people play many other things with the guitar tuned this way and all have had a more than agreeable sound. Just as with the EBVT however, I know of no one whom I've shown how to do this who could ever remember it. They always go back to tuning in whichever way they had learned and this usually wasn't really ET. I seem to find the same occurrence among piano technicians. Very few seem to be able to catch on to what a Well-Tempered or any other HT type temperament is or how to do it. They always go running back to the perceived safety of whatever they had always done before even though it was often not really what they thought it was or intended it to be. Here are the values you can use to tune the guitar with an SAT in the Vallotti type temperament and a Victorianized variation of it: All values are read on Octave 4 (very important) Vallotti type: E2 A2 D3 G3 B3 E4 -4.0 0.0 2.0 4.0 -2.0 0.0 Victorian Variation: E2 A2 D3 G3 B3 E4 -2.0 0.0 1.0 2.0 -1.0 0.0 Please don't write to me saying that these figures "don't look right" or "wouldn't work", "those 4ths wouldn't be acceptable", "the unisons would be out" or anything else negative or derogatory. They are the results of a carefully constructed aural tuning. Guitar strings have a certain amount of inharmonicity just as piano strings do. This causes the higher strings to have a higher numerical value than you might expect. I sincerely hope that there is someone out there whose guitar playing will benefit from this information. Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
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