what's the difference between 12 equal and 19 eq?

Haverstick here...something very amusing happened to me today
(Sunday, Nov. 5). Finally, the disaster I've been fearing happened...I
had a gig this morning (I play acoustic guitar at a Spanish language
service at a church...the Spanish hymns are often lovely), and I had
left my 12 tone guitar at a friend's house...there was no time to go get
it, I was almost late. What to do? I grabbed my 19 tone acoustic, and
buffaloed my way through the service, rather successfully, I might add.
Yes, there were a few fingering boo boos, but the main, chordal, parts
of the hymns went over as usual...only my 6 year old daughter noticed
that I had screwed up on an intro (only because of lack of practice
time).
What does this mean? That 19, at least on fairly simple, diatonic
type songs, will work just fine as a sub for 12. The funny thing is that
the singers were right on pitch, even though the intervals between
chords were different than 12...they were "fooled" into hearing what
they thought was 12 eq. Of course, that's because the chords in 19 sound
so similar to chords in 12. I had fun trying to get through the tunes;
with a bit of practice, I'm sure using 19 in place of 12 would be no
problemo.
This is good news for "microtonalists", because it shows that basic,
"pop" type music can be successfully performed in another tuning system,
and sound just fine...it was a cool experience...Hstick

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