Comment by good-point-sir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by good-point-sir | Hacker News Reader

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Excellent information here! For something a little more unusual, you can see guitar players in the experimental realm (think John Coltrane, not Thurston Moore) use four finger per string technique in standard/fourths tuning via the work of Ollie Halsall and Allan Holdsworth. Highly nimble and skilled, these guys were the 60s/70s inspiration for later shred-monsters like Eddie Van Halen (who worked to get Holdsworth a record deal). Something must have been in the water around Cambridge during the late 60's for two completely different oddballs to emerge with nearly identical techniques, especially considering that they both played in the same band for a brief moment. (Allan Holdsworth played with Tony Williams, Jean Luc Ponty, and Soft Machine. Ollie Halsall played in Patto, a band that Queen opened for and Led Zeppelin could barely keep up with, along with gigs with Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers. Rumor has it Ron Wood was the next choice after Ollie during the Rolling Stones' mid 70s lineup change).

Ah. My favorite guitarist's name dropped.

It should be noted that Holdsworth actually played a bit of violin (you can hear it on Temporary Fault off I.O.U.; Karzie Key off the infamous Velvet Darkness album; and recordings of Tempest, Soft Machine, w/ Gordon Beck, and Gong).

Holdsworth even experimented with fifths tuning on his SynthAxe (since you could just do that in software), most notably for the song Non Brewed Condiment[1] off Atavachron, and the solo in In the Mystery, I believe, and had a separately tuned guitar for the live performance of the aforementioned song[2].

There's an interview from the 90s where he talks about his thoughts on fourths vs fifths[3].

He later said at a clinic (in the 2000s) that if he were to relearn the guitar, he would've used all-fourths tuning[4].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTCQ1-GzIg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO3o484Z2OU

[3] http://www.fingerprintsweb.net/ah/press/gui0585b.html

[4] https://streamable.com/njyj8

Fouths tuning is all right for chromatic runs. You can play five notes per string with a slide legato, or go diagonally:

      x x x x
        x x x x
          x x x x

The major third between the G - B strings in standard tuning provides relief from the diagonal

      x x x x
        x x x x } maj 3rd
        x x x x }
          x x x x
          ...

It seems like chromatic runs would be a source of difficulty for the violinist tuning in standard fifths.

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