Cheap Explorations -- the Temporary Guitar

It was a busy weekend for me, but I now have a microtonal instrument
that is a bit less unwieldy than my keyboard. I don't take ultimate
inspirational credit for this by any means, but I thought that others
would be interested in the success story.

I had de-fretted a cheapie classical guitar that I had some time ago,
with intent of fretting it to a xenharmonic scale, but hadn't decided
which one yet, and I never seemed to get around to placing that order
to Stew-Mac. I tried tying frets, using old strings, but was never
able to get them to lie flat against the fingerboard.

Finally, this past Saturday, the desire to do some exploration
overcame the mental barrier about needing to have "real" frets, and a
quick trip to the shop produced a handfull of bits of fine 4130
welding wire (not that it matters, but 4130 is a rather musical steel,
IMO, at least judging by the bicycle part wind chimes I build a few
years ago).

A couple of hours later, I had cemented down, trimmed, and filed 31
pieces of wire, fretting the guitar to 22TET, more or less. Dipping
the wire into the tube of cement (Duco Cement) provided enough
adhesive to hold the fret to the board, even after it had been slid
around to fine tune, without making the appearance too unsightly. I
had cut the wires long to provide ease of handling, and then snipped
off the "handle" when the cement had hardened.

The acutal tuning was done by ear, using my synth as a guide, and
tuning by unisons and octaves on the first and fifth string
(`A'10). Not exactly precision, but it seems good enough for my
purposes at the moment, and it actually had a sort of "warm, earthy"
feel in its imperfection.

By all appearances, this operation can be done numerous times without
harming the structural integrity of the instrument and without a slew
of specialized tools. The downside is that its accuracy may leave
something to be desired (wires not perfectly straight, or not
perfectly set, varying intonation, etc.).

I call it "temporary" for a couple of reasons:

The first is that the wires can be removed with a little acetone, and
the finger board sanded if necessary, and recemented down in a
different tuning. I had sealed the fingerboard with Minwax wood
hardener (or something) when I made it fretless, which seems to both
provide a good bond with the cement, and prevent it from soaking into
the wood too far.

The second is that the whole affair seems rather delicate, so I don't
expect it to last all that long before it needs attention. As long as
it survives long enough for me to decide whether its tuning-du-jour is
worth preserving in a "permanent" fingerboard, though, it will have
served its purpose.


Now, the fun part begins... :-)


BTW, the inspiration came from something I recall reading long ago
about the frets of the being adjusted and then fixed with
wax. [If anyone knows what instrument that is, could you refresh my
memory? I want to say sitar, but I don't think that's correct]


Hoping someone finds value in this,

Steve


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> I'm looking into getting a sampler/synth unit and leaning towards the EMU
4X/64
> models or the Kurzweil 2000/2500 models. Does anyone know how microtuning
> friendly they are?

I don't personally own one, but I've heard been considerable discussion
about the K2x00 on the list and from a friend who has one.

Without a doubt, it doesn't have a generic tuning table capability by
which each key of the keyboard may be retuned to any arbitrary pitch.
(Most of the Ensoniq line does, by the way.) There are instead three
separate mechanisms that you have to learn and apply separately. The going
answer seems to be that these things are easy:
1. Tuning the interval between all adjacent keys equally to any multiple of

2 cents. All adjacent keys
2. Tuning the twelve notes of each C-C octave identically to just about
anything. Switching off between several such tables with SysEx messages
is also easy. These are strictly 12-tone tables though, and repeat only
in exact octaves.
3. Using a Max patch to retune every note on the fly according to what
might
be called a "sample and hold" controller. (It memorizes the
most-recently
set value to ... I think it's something like controller #25 ... and you
can then adjust a note's pitch based upon that. It's sort of like pitch
bend except that it has no effect upon notes already playing)

Doing #1 to a finer resolution is also possible, but much more
difficult. That is what you'd want if you wanted, for example, to map
19-tone equal-temperament linearly, meaning note-for-note/key-for-key
across the keyboard, mismatching octave boundaries of the tuning with
octave boundaries on the keyboard.

From what I've heard, I doubt if there's any way to tuning a K2x00 like
Partch's Chromelodeon, which uses an irregular spacing between keys
spanning across an octave of 43 keys. Or similarly, my mapping for 88CET
tuning, wherein I use a linear, key-for-key/note-for-note mapping except
that I omit the G#/Ab key from that setup. (Or to put it another way, the
gap between all pairs of adjacent keys is 88 cents, except that G#/Ab key
is tuned to the same pitch as its adjacent A key.) That mapping would
probably not be possible on the K2x00, except through external computer
assistance (#3 above).

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