Re : [tuning] Yamashita/Dowland (was: Bach and tuning)

Dante Rosati:

> No shit about Kazuhito, he's amazing. I heard him live once, and for the
> first few seconds my mind bugged out at the sound he was producing, it
> sounded more like a piano, and my brain would not match it to the image of a
> guy on stage with a guitar. Awesome.

He has got so many abilities that one day he may become the Glenn Gould of
the guitar, if he forgets about speed. (That's what Gould did, if you
compare his first
recording of the Goldberg Variations with the one he made much later) That's
what I'm hoping for and that's why I'm curious to hear his Bach recordings.

> He's constantly adjusting the tuning
> while he's playing, reaching across w/ his right hand to tweak a peg in the
> middle of a passage. I wonder if some of it is trying to adjust ET to sound
> better as the harmonies change.
His transcription of Mussorgsky is full of scordatura. On stage this demands
a special tuning-peg virtuosity, as strings go up or down almost immediately
after the scodatura.
> I think most guitarists realize early on
> that there is no way to tune the third string so that both Cmajor and Emajor
> chords sound good, its one or the other. Of course it could be because all
> guitars are basically out of tune anyway, no matter what you do.
When setting moveable frets into 12tet, the single fret for he G# on the
third string ends up most of the time closer to the nut than the other ones.
Sometimes up to 3 mm, especially with a thick G string. This difference is
already less important for the A and tends to disappear around the C. To
compensate the third string, I've put a 2mm size piece of bone under the
string right at the nut. In this way the moveable frets stay more or less in
a straight line, which is the most comfortable way.
> (skip)

> I think Wim had his moveable fret guitar in meantone to play Dowland
> at the last Microthon. A guitar hard-fretted in a given meantone would kind
> of limit the pieces you could play, unless of course what you wanted to do
> was make up your own.

Dowland indications are conceived for straight frets. The result sounds a
bit like meantone, especially when you play in G (or g), since the fourth
fret gives a low F# on the 2nd string and a low B on the first string. (I
use a capo) The major third is in between the 4th and the 3d string and is
exactly pythagorean. Joe Monzo gives a lot of information on his web-site:
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html

BTW: I played Dowland on the AFMM Festival in 1997 and 1999. Both of these
concerts were at St. Paul's Chapel. On the Microthon 1999, where we met, I
played Milan, Narvaez and Mudarra in 5-limit Just Intonation.

--Wim