Microtonal instruments

It's been pretty interesting to see who plays what so here's my 2 cents-

I've got an electric guitar and bass both with warmouth necks in 19tet. They
were both fenders- a Stratocaster and a Precision bass. Todd keehn of Denver
Colorado did the work. Todd does excellent work, unfortunately, last I heard
was carpal tunnel syndrome had slow his luthiership down to a crawl. In any
case, the Strat sounds nothing like a classic Strat now. It got more sustain
and timbrally it's much more monochromatic and doesn't have that twang fenders
have. The P-bass still sounds and plays like a p-bass. I've lent these
instruments to a number of excellent musicians and they really like them,
also. The necks also were made with a flat radius.

I've also got a great double neck Gibson Lee steel guitar form the early 60's
(I think from the early 60's) It has an amazingly warm sound. I run it through
a Hughes and Kettner Triamp into an old Rodgers tone cabinet (from the 50's I
think). The sound is so rich. I've got that thing usually tuned to and open
19tet tuning.

On the synth side of things I've got a Kurzweil K2000 with a sampler. That's
also usually tuned to 19tet. It's a great synth but after playing around with
it for a couple of years I've got to say that digitally produced synth music
leaves me at best luke warm. Even guys that are really excellent with them
like Brian Eno and the Orb or Tricky don't produce music with them that I can
really totally get into. And this is not a criticism of them at all it's
a criticism of the instruments. It's a shame that we don't have acoustic
instruments or electro acoustic instruments available to us more readily and
ones that are readily playable. In my opinion so much of music has nothing to
do with the tuning and has to do with the feel the musician puts behind the
notes. Compare the sound of a great digital synth to a Hammond B-3 or a
Wurlitzer electric piano and it's dissapointing. The Hammond or Wurlitzer
tends to evince musical phrases and nuance but with the Kurzweil I always have
felt like I'm sitting behind a glass pane watching music arise in the next
room. This, of course, is only my experience.

I've got bunch of other 12tet instruments but that's for another time.


Denis


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