Refretting guitars, Tuning FAQ, etc.

I appreciate all the kind words (Dan especially) but I feel the recent
conflicts show that I should "chill out" on the list for a while.

Anyway, over the several years this list was on the Mills server, and the
several months on the Onelist server, many, many questions were asked by
"beginners", and some of these questions were asked "frequently". For
example, Darin Arrick just asked,

>First, what tuning would be best for someone who is interested
>in playing around? 22TET? 24TET (easy to refret!)? 19TET? 31TET?
>Some sort of JI? 19 fret LucyTuning? Something else?

I (and others) explained on many occasions (and love doing so) how 19-tET
and 31-tET allow for conventional diatonic thinking and notation, while
22-tET does not. 22-tET and especially 31-tET allow one to approximate
chords that involve harmonics (or subharmonics) through the 7th and, with
less accuracy, all the way through the 11th. I recommend ETs over non-ETs on
the guitar because (for one thing) in ETs the frets go straight across,
allowing string bending as usual. But Jon Catler has done great work with
both wildly-staggered-JI-fretted and fretless guitar. Darin, I too am a big
Yes fan (just finished reading the new Chris Welch book) but, despite Yes's
diatonic orientation, I play a 22-tET guitar, which I had John Starrett fret
for me because of the ideas in my paper:
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret/22ALL.pdf.

What should ideally be done is, someone should go through all the years of
archives, compile the questions in order of frequency, and come up with a
consensus summary of the answers.

I would love to undertake such a project but don't have the time. I
contribute to the List during my free time at work. Away from work, I play
guitar. When not performing, I spend hours a day keeping my chops up and
developing my style. 99% of the time, sorry to say, it's on plain old
12-tone guitar. Ultimately, I want to spend more time on microtonality;
hopefully that will involve both performing and writing a book that will go
from beginning through advanced material.

For now, perhaps Graham Breed's page provides the best introduction to
tuning, temperament, lattices, etc. that covers the "advanced" material
without any prerequisites. It's too bad Graham has dropped the link to my
22-tET paper from his page :(

I would like to respond to a few more things from the latest digest before I
lay low for a while --

Kraig Grady wrote,

> Joe!
> My point which I will not let up on, is to speak the language of your
> peers and or your audience. If Wilson can manage to convey his ideas with
> such simple language I can't understand why the rest of you can't!

I think Joe Monzo and others who have told me so will agree that Erv Wilson
is one of the most unforgiving theorists ever to delve into microtonality.
His writing is so dense, and his thought process so concealed, that one
could easily write a book trying to explain a single Wilson article to a
beginner. While academic journal articles tend to proceed logically, point
by point, Wilson's style is unbelievably abstruse. What I love about him is
that he often has more to say in a single diagram than ten articles can say
in a hundred pages of text!

David Bearsley wrote,

>Generally I try to practice with a sine drone . . .
>One of the lower harmonics I have problems
>finding is 13.

A sine drone has no harmonics, therefore it is not surprising that you have
problems finding them! Any repeating waveform other than a sine wave would
be a better choice.

Carl Lumma wrote (concerning the two main scales in my 22-tET paper):

>Paul, do you think your preference for the
>pentachordal decatonics can be explained by the lower efficiency of the
>symmetric ones?

Maybe -- the symmetry of the latter makes it impossible to decide between
one tonic and other a half-octave away; that may be a disturbing feature
which makes me unconfortable. But I'm convinced that the fact that the other
scale "breaks the symmetry" at the perfect fifth and not at some other
interval is significant in making it aurally pleasing.

Daniel Wolf wrote,

>I still don't follow why
>Paul Erlich needs to use entropy

At first, I just used the likelihood of the most likely interpretation. But
then I realized that, given a likelihood of the most likely interpretation,
the consonance would be lower if the second-most likely interpretation were
high, and higher if it were low. And so on ad infinitum. The entropy is a
natural function of the set of likelihoods that measures the degree of
randomness or "noisiness" and theoretically the expected length of a code
that could communicate what is being heard. The result is a model of
intervallic dissonance based on the virtual pitch phenomenon and is
timbre-independent for harmonic timbres, as opposed to the
Plomp-Levelt-Sethares model which is based on the critical-band rougness
phenomenon and is highly timbre-dependent.

Finally, I'm glad the consensus is not to split the list. Tuning is an
inherently mathematical subject and we all should approach it with a
willingness and curiosity to learn more mathematics.

It doesn't look like I'm doing a good job of chilling out. But I think it's
only fair that I join Dave Keenan and Patrick Pagano and take a break for a
while. Please feel free to e-mail me privately on any of these subjects.

Paul H. Erlich wrote:

> David Bearsley wrote,
>
> >Generally I try to practice with a sine drone . . .
> >One of the lower harmonics I have problems
> >finding is 13.
>
> A sine drone has no harmonics, therefore it is not surprising that you have
> problems finding them! Any repeating waveform other than a sine wave would
> be a better choice.

Theoretically. [no suprise here] The sine tone I get outof my Korg is a bit
brighter than the ones that I hear in the
C Sound audio snippets that Pat sends me or the ones
I hear at the Dream House.

I think my original problem stems from using the Sebring *dobro*
clone that I bought last year. The body is steel, not a particularly
resonant material in this instance. Sure, I could have used any
of the other acoustic or electric guitars I have around, but I
was into the romance of the blues.

--
* D a v i d B e a r d s l e y
* xouoxno@virtulink.com
*
* J u x t a p o s i t i o n N e t R a d i o
* M E L A v i r t u a l d r e a m house monitor
*
* http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm