Amateur question

I have two fixed-pitch instruments.An acoustic piano and a Fender Rhodes.If I tune them to 24 or 31 notes an octave , will I be able to play anything structured or diatonic , except of close spaced quarter note runs?
Can anybody play ?
excuse my ignorance(I am studing though)
Alex from Greece

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You won't be able to do that to your acoustic piano without breaking
strings. Your Rhodes can only be retuned by a small amount, so you won't be
able to do that either. Otherwise, 31 is great for structured, diatonic
music, since it is a meantone tuning; while 24 is little more than two sets
of 12 (except for Arabic scales, etc.) . . .

Are there any acoustic or electro-acoustic keyboard instruments with
microtonal capabilities ? What can be done for the keyboardist who
wants to get into different tunings except synthesizers?
Should I give up keyboards(and years of training)and switch to violin
or trumpet or digital synths(...).
Dont't get me wrong , I love every instrument I said except digital synths.
Thanks for your patience
Alex

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On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Alexandros Papadopoulos wrote:

> Are there any acoustic or electro-acoustic keyboard instruments with
> microtonal capabilities ? What can be done for the keyboardist who
> wants to get into different tunings except synthesizers?[...]

Um, any keyboard with strings in it, somebody has to tune the strings.
What you need to do is learn how to tune your own -- then you can play
in any tuning you wish. Easiest keyboard to learn to tune is harpsichord;
start there.

Judy

Judith Conrad wrote,

>Um, any keyboard with strings in it, somebody has to tune the strings.
>What you need to do is learn how to tune your own -- then you can play
>in any tuning you wish. Easiest keyboard to learn to tune is harpsichord;
>start there.

Judith -- the poster wanted to have much more than 12 notes per octave. The
harpsichord would not work for this purpose, _unless_ you had multiple (n)
manuals, in which case you could get 12*n notes per octave --- right?

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Paul H. Erlich wrote:

> Judith -- the poster wanted to have much more than 12 notes per octave. The
> harpsichord would not work for this purpose, _unless_ you had multiple (n)
> manuals, in which case you could get 12*n notes per octave --- right?

No, you don't actually need multiple manuals. Split sharps are a very
historical way of building harpsichords, allowing for up to 5 extra notes
per octave. Split naturals could be built on the same principles. Willard
Martin in Pennsylvania, and Bill Jurgenson, formerly of Michigan but
currently in Lauffen somewhere on the banks of the Neckar in Germany,
build them now. Bill was on this list for a while.

The ideas juxtaposed, that you need an electronic instrument to
study microtunings because they cannot be done acoustically, AND that
people whose brains are not seriously mutated out of normal pathways are
supposed to care about the music thus produced, are incompatible. In my of
course very humble opinion.

Judy

Clark on this list has built some interesting acoustic keyboards
(harpsichords?) with crazy keyboards allowing more than 17 notes per octave
. . . Clark?

>Judith -- the poster wanted to have much more than 12 notes per octave. The
>harpsichord would not work for this purpose, _unless_ you had multiple (n)
>manuals, in which case you could get 12*n notes per octave --- right?

Paul- it isn't the number of manuals, but the number of scales inside that
counts. On many multiple-manual harpsichords, the manuals may be assigned
in various ways to what's inside by way of lever. The same goes for (less
common) single-manual, multi-scale instruments. The trouble is that the
different scales are traditionally used to change the timbre of the
instrument, and so the microtonal user will have to put up with interleaved
timbres. D'oh!

-Carl

Carl -- the original poster wanted to be able to perform quarter-tone runs,
etc. If you have a single manual, how fast would you have to shake the lever
back and forth to perform a quarter-tone run? :)

>Carl -- the original poster wanted to be able to perform quarter-tone runs,
>etc. If you have a single manual, how fast would you have to shake the lever
>back and forth to perform a quarter-tone run? :)

I guess that depends... I'm pretty fast. Actually, I think such a lever
would be great. Michael Harrison has done impressive things with a pedal,
and the "lever" on a harpsichord is often in the form of a pedal. In fact,
since harpsichords already have this kind of pedal, they are arguably
better-suited to this technique than pianos, with which Harrison was left
to modifying the una corda mechanism. It would be great to have a
harpsichord designed with two identical scales, with jacks to switch by
pedal, scaled for 24 out-of 31-tET.

The root-controller idea takes on new scope with electronics, and the
ability to root on all twelve of the top keys, rather than onto only two.
I have often wondered how easy it might be to take a midi controller -- say,
a pedalboard -- and use it to control the roots on a normal keyboard up top.
Note-ons from the pedal could be sorted by note number -- perhaps by a CAL
applet, which would then apply the appropriate pitch bend to all the notes
from the keys.

-Carl

Carl wrote,

>It would be great to have a
>harpsichord designed with two identical scales, with jacks to switch by
>pedal, scaled for 24 out-of 31-tET.

But any chords would have to come from one of two sets of 12, right? That
doesn't seem very useful.

>>It would be great to have a harpsichord designed with two identical scales,
>>with jacks to switch by pedal, scaled for 24 out-of 31-tET.
>
>But any chords would have to come from one of two sets of 12, right? That
>doesn't seem very useful.

Are you kidding? You could play most things through Beethovan in meantone,
for starters. Yes, this is more of a consonance-added approach than a
xenharmonic one, but for some of us, 12-tET just doesn't cut it for 5-limit
on acoustic instruments. And Harrison showed that 24 tones of 7-limit JI
are intersting. It isn't hard to subset the 7-limit in such a way that all
complete tetrads fall on one manual at a time. Yes, this approach is
ultimately going to be just a subset of Margo's double-manual suggestion, but
I think it's a great deal more intuitive at the keyboard, and more than
promising enough to justify the construction of a few harpsichords.

-Carl

--- In tuning@egroups.com, Carl Lumma <CLUMMA@N...> wrote:
> >>It would be great to have a harpsichord designed with two
identical scales,
> >>with jacks to switch by pedal, scaled for 24 out-of 31-tET.
> >
> >But any chords would have to come from one of two sets of 12,
right? That
> >doesn't seem very useful.
>
> Are you kidding? You could play most things through Beethovan in
meantone,
> for starters.

I don't get it. Wouldn't many keys require some notes from one set of
12, and other notes from the other set of 12, at the same time?

>And Harrison showed that 24 tones of 7-limit JI
> are intersting.

Micheal Harrison, yes.

--- In tuning@egroups.com, Carl Lumma <CLUMMA@N...> wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/14121

>
> Are you kidding? You could play most things through Beethovan

Hmmm. I would prefer a "mini-van," or perhaps even a SUV...

_______ ___ __ _
Joseph Pehrson

>I don't get it. Wouldn't many keys require some notes from one set of
>12, and other notes from the other set of 12, at the same time?

You can get 12 non-manual-spanning diatonic keys from 18 tones by
tuning one manual to...

Ab---Eb---Bb---F----C----G----D----A----E----B----F#---C#
\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
\/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \
Ab---Eb---Bb---F----C----G----D----A----E----B----F#---C#

...and the other to...

D----A----E----B----F#---C#---G#---D#---A#---E#---B#---Fx
\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
\/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \
D----A----E----B----F#---C#---G#---D#---A#---E#---B#---Fx

If you don't overlap, you can still get 12 non-spanning keys, plus six
spanning keys, although I'd probably prefer to overlap and get continuity.

Interstingly, Michael Zarkey has fitted his historic harpsichord with a
19-tone generalized keyboard that allows one to do chromatic runs without
a lever. But you do get the timbre-switching I mentioned, which is
absolutely paralyzing.

-Carl

Carl,

Overlapping the two sets of twelve so that you only have 18 distinct
pitches, I understand. I thought you said 24-out-of-meantone, though.

-Paul