88CET Guitar

My brother just asked me about how my 88CET guitar-refret job turned out.
Perhaps some of you might also be interested.

The guitar turned out juuuust fine. It looks pretty much like it came of the
factory that way. The old fret grooves are almost indetectable. There's still
a couple of minor cleanups I need to do, but they are indeed minor.

One fellow on the Cocoa Beach tipped me with a nickel. I concluded that he
probably didn't really hear me because:
1. I could hardly hear myself over the wonderful wave crashing.
2. He gave me only a nickel.
3. If he had in fact actually heard me, he would probably not have even
given me that!

After experimenting with several known-useful chord structures, notably
harmonic- and subharmonic-series fragments, stacks of neutral and supramajor
thirds, I came up with an open-string tuning that seems to work well. Since
guitars are normally tuned in fourths, and since two fourths stack up to minor
seventh, I figured that it made sense to tune it such that the interval between
every other string is 88CET's 7:4 subminor seventh approximation. That was even
more meaningful because my notation system uses that interval as the "cycle"
interval, in the same sense that traditional tunings use the octave.

In my notaton system, two adjacent Bs (for example) are a subminor seventh
apart, although neither of their pitches is the same as any traditional B. (I
keep middle C at the same constant pitch between both systems. It probably
would have been more appropriate to keep A=440Hz the same, but that was
convenient at the time. I probably ought to revamp my ASR-10 pitch table one of
these days.

So anyway the question was how to distribute the pitches of each string pair
within their subminor-seventh span. What seemed to render the most
known-interesting chords the most fluidly was tuning the intervals between
successive strings (from low-string to high) was supramajor third, off-fourth,
supramajor third, off-fourth, supramajor third. Or to put it another way,
* Fifth fret on the low-string gives the pitch of the second-lowest string,
* Sixth fret on the second-lowest string gives the pitch of the third-lowest
string,
* Fifth fret on the third-lowest string gives the pitch of the third-highest
string,
* Sixth fret on the third-highest string gives the pitch of the second-highest
string, and
* Fifth fret on the second-highest string gives the pitch of the highest
string.
In my notation system, the note-names under that scheme that worked out closest
to the traditional guitar's pitch range came out to be A D A D A D, the low A
being notated as the A below the bass staff.

While I was on the beach, I got the first inklings of a 88CET-guitar
composition, and I started writing it up on the airplane on the way back. I'll
frame it in homage to Ivor Darreg, because - toward the beginning anyway - it
has a little bit of the flavor of some of Ivor's guitar preludes, but it gets
more intricate shortly after that.


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Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 00:06:53 -0700
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