ET guitar (was Bassplaying)

[Billbrpt@AOL.COM]

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