Re: Digest Number 349

Glen Peterson:
>There's a fellow named Buzz who I think has a patent on this technique.
>(really!) He put out a video demonstrating the wonders of his new
>fretting system. He never said how it worked, but it wasn't that hard to
>figure out that he'd just slid the nut forward a millimeter or two.

Yes, we had a discussion of the Buzz Feiten system here awhile back, and
while it seems to be effective (my friend Harry Fleishman heard a side by
side of several different types guitars with and without the Feiten system
and said the difference was obvious) I have never quite understood why the
nut should be higher from the first fret than the first fret is from the
second. With a zero fret, what would the solution to the problem of
differing pitch bends for different string to fret distances be? Wouldn't
we need to consider where a player plays on average and just tune the
bridge appropriately?

Judith Conrad:
>One can either have one string per note, as in an 'Unfretted clavichord',
>and this was really a late-eighteenth century invention, or one can have
>more than one string per note -- ergo 'fretted'.

You mean "more than one note per string" I think. I have never seen the
guts of a real clavichord in person, only schematics. I would love to play
one. Does anyone know of any in the Denver area?

Finally, Chris Mohr of Denver ordered a microtonal button matrix thing
from Starr Labs, and it is supposed to be delivered in the next week.
I can't wait to play it. Chris is working on a huge project, a song cycle
based on the mystical poems of many of the worlds great poets. Man, I hope
that wasn't suppposed to be a secret and that I got it right.

John Starrett
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret