Posted by digitallogic 4 days ago
Advanced banjo players will sometimes use harmonics for a ‘bell’ effect. Here’s a short video from Alison Brown, a great player.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubadQ1jcWOM
And the late Jaco Pastorius with the bass harmonics song that would have broken the Internet if we had had the internet when he released his first solo album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsZ_1mPOuyk
Speaking as a person who owns basses... I like the sound of harmonics on a bass better. I think it's something to do with the longer strings giving more play to the overtones.
I have software I use when I tune my Bosendorfer 290 that calculates the stretch. Of course, the final tweaks are done by ear.
So you've got to tune your guitar to sound good with them and probably not just matching your open strings to their corresponding notes.
While your electronic tuner flashes an ugly warning or the strobe tuner won't stand still :(
However if you want more notes than that to be their best you're going to have to compromise and work at it a bit.
Now if you want the instrument to sound its absolute best on its own solo, a slightly different place for some strings.
And then depending on other musicians you are playing with and the way their tuning has achieved perfection (or not), some further tweaking can make a big difference.
And that's after accepting that the "knobs can only be in one place".
For students to get really good at the tuning process can require a few extra years of everyday practice more than it does to learn to play a few pieces.
Part of the limitation is the way only a few minutes of tuning are spent for every hour of practice, if that.
I'm a relatively new adult beginner on the violin, and one of the fascinating (and extremely difficult) things about un-fretted string instruments is the player has the freedom to shift the tuning around to fit the context. On the violin, we normally play melodies and scales using Pythagorean tuning (which is actually a misnomer as Pythagoras didn't invent it, the ancient Mesopotamians did), which is based on the circle of fifths and leads to wider whole steps and narrower half steps than equal temperment tuning. But then for double stops (i.e. chords), and especially when playing in a string quartet, just intonation, which is based on the harmonic series, is used so the notes sound concordant. This page describes all the different tuning systems a violinist may use, also including 12 TET when trying to match a piano: https://www.violinmasterclass.com/posts/152.
This video shows how challenging it can be when trying to adjust intonation when playing in a string quartet: https://youtu.be/Q7yMAAGeAS4 . Interestingly, the very beginning of that video talks about what TFA discussed that when you tune all your strings as perfect fifths your major thirds will be out of tune.
I'll also put in a plug for light note, an online music theory training tool that was mentioned on HN a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792063 . I'm not related to the owner in any way, I just bought access a few years ago and think it was the first time I really understood Western music theory. The problem with music theory is that the notation is pretty fucked up because it includes all this historical baggage, and lots of music theory courses start with what we've got today and work backwards, while I think it's a lot easier to start with first principles about frequency ratios and go from there.
Other notes (pun intended!): The violin is great for learning music theory because you can actually see on the string how much you're subdividing it - go one third of the way, that's a perfect fifth, go halfway, that's an octave, etc. Harmonics (where you lightly touch a string) are also used all the time in violin repertoire. Finally, the article mentions Harry Patch, but you should also check out Ben Johnston, a composer who worked with Patch and was famous for using just intonation. Here is is Amazing Grace string quartet, and you can really hear the difference using just intonation: https://youtu.be/VJ8Bg9m5l50
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?
Generosity is worth having by default, though. Filter people out when they burn it explicitly.
Whether it's testes or testy language, getting personal and insulting does not meet my personal standard for assuming good intent and being worthy of an open-minded attempt to create constructive dialogue.
But I applaud you for wanting to lift the standard of discourse!
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 scales aren't right. Absurd.
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.
The goal of regular guitar intonation and bridge adjustment is to get the guitar as close as possible to 12 tone equal temperament (TET), which is slightly ‘out of tune’ as the article describes. 12 TET is the best you can do if you want something equally close to perfect fifths (or thirds, etc.) in all positions in all keys across all string combinations; that’s what 12 TET is for, it’s designed to minimize the worse case, at the expense of losing the best case.
The only thing that is absurd here is your bizarre strawman that discussing equal temperament is somehow non-musical and that engineers can’t understand what music is because they want to measure things.
Oh, and that applies to standard tuning only. YMMV with alternative tunings, especially the open tunings.
0: https://www.guyguitars.com/truetemperament/eng/tt_techdetail...
Just because we live with the trade-off doesn’t make it correct in any other sense.
Agree with the OP that the characteristics of the guitar, including its "out of perfect tune", is what gives its music its unique characteristic. It's not a bug it's a feature. There might be some people with perfect pitch who get annoyed but for most people that's "colour" and the sound they expect and associate with their favorite music. If you played those songs on an "ideal" guitar they would not sound right.
EVH famously tuned his B string slightly flat to make his D (on the 3rd fret) sound better. Look it up.
e —0–
B —0–
G —7–
D —6–
A —7–
E —0–
In general your ears do not hear these little arithmetical games around mismatched harmonies. They hear things like “this chord sounds warm and a little sad, this one is bright and fun.”
With 12 of the strings on a sitar having equal (thin) diameter, but different lengths so they can be tuned to the 12 notes in the scale, these are also unplayed strings which contribute to the sound by resonating underneath the main course of strings which are the ones fretted and manually played on.
That's so endearing I guess that's why they call them sympathetic strings ;)
While my guitar gently weeps, etc. . .