I believe it's not possible to make a equally tempered fretted instrument. I say that because even the best acoustic/classical guitars made require slight adjustments to the tuning for different keys. The quality of the intervals, especially thirds and sixths, simply don't quite remain the same as you change keys and most guitarists will make tuning adjustments depending on the key to compensate. I can't offer the scientific explanation at this point. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Fred Sturm Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 7:34 PM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: Re: [CAUT] historic temp thoughts On Nov 30, 2009, at 8:09 PM, David Love wrote: FWIW fretted instruments are not actually equally tempered instruments and require subtle manipulations of the tuning depending on which key you are playing in. I'm not sure I understand what you mean in your first sentence. Are you talking about intention (design), or just the problems due to the fact that design is never perfectly followed? As in woodwind instruments, where the holes are never perfectly placed, and one always has to compensate. Or issues of the various strings, all being the same lengths but different thicknesses, having different tensions, hence different responses to pressure at the frets? Instruments with movable frets - essentially viola da gamba -move their frets and often slant them, depending on the temperament being used. And they still have to compensate in order to match pitch. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091130/cb0dce8d/attachment.htm>
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