temperament

[D.Martens]

Hi Charles and list ,
 you wrote:
>What is the temperament of a guitar? As I understand it, the strings are
>tuned to each other in perfect intervals, so it can't be equal
>temperament. The frets determine the intervals on each string. Do they
>make an equal tempered scale on each string?

Most guitars should be ET, as far as possible.
Fretting guitars is very difficult to do right.....
When playing hardrock or heavy metal, it sounds nice to have the Gstring
tuned a little flat, so it makes a pure major third  with the Bstring, when
playing the 'openchord- type -Emajor.'
Especially with a distortion or overdrive  and reverb units  this sounds
very cool.
 (hmm.. how about it on a piano..(grin))
Some steel guitar players like to play with an open chord tuning.
A lot of blues players enjoy the open E-chord, when using the bottleneck:
E,B,E,G#,B,E.
5th>4th>3rd>3rd>4th

I read somewhere that it was the Italian Guitarbuilder Lanfranco, who was
the first to actually build a fretted Instrument  using ET, somewhere in the
1500 's.

Duncan.

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Neuman <cneuman@phy.duke.edu>
To: pianotech@ptg.org <pianotech@ptg.org>
Date: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 5:20 PM
Subject: temperament


>What is the temperament of a guitar? As I understand it, the strings are
>tuned to each other in perfect intervals, so it can't be equal
>temperament. The frets determine the intervals on each string. Do they
>make an equal tempered scale on each string?
>
>Also, I assume violin players and other string players tune their strings
>to perfect intervals. Are string players concerned with temperament?
>Perhaps that's too subtle a distinction to make while playing an
>instrument where the scale is determined by the player's fingers, and not
>by the physical characteristics of the instrument.
>
>Charles Neuman
>
>
>
>