Re 31 tet instruments

> Hi...
>
> I would like to correspond with anyone seriously into 31 ET - instruments
> made, scales, etc. - basically anything anybody's willing to share about
> what they're doing with it. I've been working on some ideas, but have
> nothing concrete to offer as yet.
>

Hi Robin,

You describe where I'm at. I'm still in the process of committing
myself to buying a 31tet guitar (I'm a guitarist, if interested see
www.microtones.com. We used to have their neck-builder on this list and he'll
do other custom work if you wanted a guitar but didn't want a G&L).

Regarding scales, I have a C program which dumps out scales given various
constraints. For instance, if you wanted all scales where the size of 'second'
was constrained to between 2 and 7 'chroma', or all scales where all fourths
are within IV and IV# (and fifths wthin V and Vb). CUrrently there is no
user-interface to speak of, and its a Unix program. In other words, I change
parameters, recompile, and I'm off and running.

The main aural experiments I've done so far have been with 12-out-of-31
tuning tables. If you play diatonic music that stays in close areas of
the circle of fifths it is quite beautiful (which describes all that
pre-Romantic musc that works great in 1/4 comma meantone). The inclusion
of good septimal approximations is a natural fit to to blues and jazz
playing (where I'm coming from), and there are a lot of other 'neutral'
and '11' area intervals that look like a rich palette.

Unfortunately, the tuning table approach limits your ability to explore
these and many other parts of the scale.

Recently I've been looking at approximations to other ets. Some of these
may be interesting systems to experiment with, even if poor approximations
of the et in question. For instance,

3tet : 10 10 11 [ 5/4 ... 9/7 ]
4tet : 8 8 8 7 [ 6/5 ... 7/6 ]
5tet : 6 6 6 6 7 [ 8/7 ... 7/6 ]
6tet : 5 5 5 5 5 6 [ 9/8 ... 8/7 ]
7tet : 4 5 4 5 4 5 4 [ 12/11? 9/8 ... ]
8tet : 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 3 [ 12/11 ... 16/15? ]
9tet : 3 4 3 4 3 4 3 4 3
10tet: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4
11tet: 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 3 3 3 2 [ ... 25/24? ]

These are all transposable systems, in that there is a suitable, single,
# or b available that will rotate the the intervals (convert to a different
mode). I can't say anything about the musical usefulness of this, and even
with a guitar, much of this is unexploreable. So the other option I've been
considering is to go to CSound or use some available scripts or write
code to explore this in MIDI via pitchbends.

Keep your ideas on the list, there are enough people here who are
knowledgeable and/or interested!

Bob Valentine

>Robert C Valentine wrote:
> >
> > You describe where I'm at. I'm still in the process of committing
> > myself to buying a 31tet guitar (I'm a guitarist, if interested see
> > www.microtones.com. We used to have their neck-builder on this list and > he'll
> > do other custom work if you wanted a guitar but didn't want a G&L).

David Beardsley wrote:

>I don't think he works on guitars anymore. Apparently
>he gave it up for the big bucks of web page design.

Well, he mainly decided to stop starving trying to make a living as a luthier. Microtonal fretting completely redefines the phrase "niche market".

Cheers,
Jon
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
Real Life: Orchestral Percussionist
Web Life: "Corporeal Meadows" - about Harry Partch
http://www.corporeal.com/