Why Is The Guitar Tuned Like It Is?
library.kiwix.org
library.kiwix.org
My favorite isomorphic tuning though is minor thirds tuning, where each fret becomes a diminished chord. This allows you to explore Barry Harris' harmonic concepts really easily, which describes major and minor 4 note chords as combinations of two diminished chords. I made a video showing how this works. [2]
The M3 interval between the G and B string is useful; you can allocate fingerings between those two strings to play certain things that don't work for a pair of strings that are a P4 apart.
The whole thread is an enjoyable read, and the answer seems to be - like many things in Western music theory - it was a design decision, a kind of legacy code, with pros and cons. "Things evolve to meet a need."
One of the answers talked about an all-fourths tuning, that some instruments use such tunings as standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_fourths_tuning
Theoretically it's more beautiful, and simplifies the shapes and their movements across the fretboard. It might be a pain to overcome years of learning patterns on the guitar with the kink - I'll have to try it. Sometimes it's good to shake up the foundation and see what new patterns emerge.
Similarly, I love the logic (and I'd say even wisdom) of the piano keyboard - but there are some kinks in there too, which introduce complexity in the patterns and their transformations, making them harder to remember. I'm curious to try a hexagonal keyboard and other alternative layouts - I imagine the symmetry has practical advantages, and to my mind more aesthetically pleasing.
Wicki–Hayden note layout - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicki%E2%80%93Hayden_note_layo...
Like you could combine a bunch of random notes together and it would sound terrible. THe reason why a certain scale is a scale is that it all jives together in a way that makes sense to the human brain.
I'm a jazz musician. The people I know who can create their own compositions and arrangements in that genre all studied theory in college.
Most people just make what sounds good to them and that creates a massive power potential to extract by labelling some of that "good" and some of that "bad" in the eyes of an arbitrary system.
The low C drones are so entrancing!
The "atom" of all music is that frequencies with simple relationships (for example, exactly 1/3x) sounds "nice" (we can hear the harmony) and frequencies with complicated relationships (pi x) sounds sour (used intentionaly with great effect by bands like Sonic Youth for example).
The essence of western music is the decision to split the octave into 12 and have this be the notes we use (anyone who have tried this will discover that we run into trouble when our instument tonal range spans more than one octave, this is where "tunings" come in).
But there are alternatives: Spliting the octave into 53 parts has way more harmonies
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/53_equal_temperament
This is partialy used in turkish music for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shruti_(music)#/media/File:Shr...
There is something "special" about 12 note chromaticism with 7 note diatonic scales.
However, the rub is that what most people consider music theory is western classical theory. There’s a lot of different music theories around the world , with different scales, structures etc…
Here’s a video you might find interesting of a microtonal guitar https://youtu.be/OVZShd7GZAY
Also a really good video on why “music theory” is often largely paired to western music https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA while there’s so many alternates out there
Music doesnt derive from music theory. Instead music theory develops to understand and examine music that already exists. A huge error that a lot of music theory hobbyists make is to overuse it or use it in contexts where it doesn’t make sense (e.g., using theory developed to understand Mahler to understand EDM).
As much as we like to imagine that music derives purely from the mathematical relationship between tones and that aliens would produce the same music we would based on universal physical principles, that’s not the case.
As a side note, after learning linnstrument, I picked up an 8 string guitar and found it much easier to translate my knowledge by tuning in all-fourths. With all-fourths, you really can learn chords as a set of (essentially) 2D glyphs that interact and fit together like Lego pieces. Inversions are easier to remember, transposition is always effortless, training your hands is quicker. Highly recommended.
Additionally, Linnstrument, like all other grid instruments that implement all-fourths or a closely-related layout, has redundancy of notes on the board. That is to say, the same note often appears at least a couple times on the board. There's a setting (default on older firmware, easy to activate on newer firmware) where you can tell the board to light up ALL other redundant individuals of a note that's currently being played. For example, when I play C3, I will see C3 lit up all over the board simultaneously. This has a huge training wheel effect both in letting you witness the shape of your tetris-tile chords elsewhere on the board, but also, always gives you a sense of the geography of the board -- where you can jump to next if you want to dance your way up/down or to another chord or note.
One of the deeply beautiful things about the guitar is this "ugly" asymmetry. People with analytical minds that desire order always get bothered by this 3rd, why not go to all 4ths and be more elegant???
Because art and music arent always about being elegant! Tuning a guitar in all 4ths lets you play like a snooty stuck up jazz musician, but ultimately there are so many richer bar chords available with that 3rd in there that who cares if it is "ugly" to have the 3rd. People forget a plain jane normal guitar chord like a G chord or something is tonally actually very complex. It isn't like a basic g chord on a piano G B D. The "basic" G chord on guitar spans many octaves and has a non-obvious combination of notes. The 3rd in there for guitar tuning allows you to explore all those complexities with the given limitations of the human hand best.
I'd love to play like Stanley Jordan, who famously uses EADGCF.
https://www.sweetwater.com/c600--6_string_Acoustic_Guitars?a...
I'm less enthusiastic about the low-cost electrics; probably want to go at least $200 and maybe something from guitarfetish.com instead.
But we love him anyway, of course
some musing:
the number of strings is constrained to allow for chord voicing across all the strings,
and to provide range,
open chords with minimal fingering complexity radically increase accessibility,
duplication is critical to support those,
capping with the double octave of the lowest note makes up-and-down strumming work,
if you're going to break pattern to coerce the highest string, it's extremely useful to also provide its dominant (5th) which makes sounding those top strings together just "work" (especially: with a bass note on the lowest string), with the side benefit that it allows learned scale patterns to work across those two strings, where most melodic playing will be up-an-down and third- fourth- or fifth- jumping or stopping,
...add all this up and it's a collection of mild but clear wins that together really strongly entail the current system.
Robert Fripp's 500 page book on guitar playing no doubt explains why this is Wrong and his preferred all-fourths tuning etc. are Better though. :)
Apparently, the tuning invented by Robert Fripp is called "New standard tuning", based on all fifths. I like the audacity to call it a new standard. :)
> C2-G2-D3-A3-E4-G4 (from lowest to highest)
> the five lowest open strings are each tuned to an interval of a perfect fifth
> the two highest strings are a minor third apart
In this vein, I'm a lifelong guitarist and someone lent me a mandolin... I've learned a lot from playing it! It's tuned to straight fifths, but since it's much smaller than a guitar, you can actually reach all the notes of the scale without moving your hand up and down the neck. (I assume this wouldn't be true of a full-sized guitar tuned to fifths, although I haven't actually tried it.)
You can pretty quickly intuit how things work, and it will give you new insights into theory. The scales show up more simply and symmetrically than on a guitar. (e.g. the western major scale in the open position is 0-2-4-5, 0-2-4-5, 0-2-3-5, 0-2-3-5)
[1] https://bartoszmilewski.com/2020/05/24/guitar-decomposed-1-w...
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Worth noting. I don't know why I didn't discover it for the first couple decades I picked up a guitar.
First I made a coil winding machine, after lots of late night research. I bought an old sewing machine and took it to pieces for the main components. After my first build I improved my machine with some 3d printed parts.
Then there is the process of choosing and sourcing the components, coils, wire magnets, wax...
Then the actual process of getting the winding done...lots of broken wires later...my tele has an awesome set of pickups which sound so clear. The neck pickup is very non standard, more like a strat pickup.
What a stupid hobby!
Making your own is the obvious solution!
I have 2 strat projects I needed pickups for too, so it will begin to pay off. I reckon I broke even in equipment (but not time) after one pickup.
I think it's a super fun hobby, I really loved the process of choosing tone and options and learning what affects what. It made my guitar feel like a real players' instrument, like I made my own tool. I'll almost certainly do it again--maybe yeah make my own pickups, but what you did is next level haha.
The guitar I put them in...I made that too. To be fair I got some of the parts from a kit (cheap way to get some parts), but I modified it in a number of ways, and changed all of the hardware. It is a lot of fun. I did think about blogging about it, but I didn't think anyone would care
I found my fuzz face recently that I spent forever characterising AC128 germanium transistors to get that magic combination...it still sounds completely mental!
I think he did it to make it easier to play+sing his songs solo, is all I can figure. Heavy use of multiple open tunings. He'll use like half a dozen tunings on one album, plays on stage with a rack of guitars so he can swap between songs.
When Stills' played in EEEEBE tuning (which he apparently learned from Palmer) it almost doesn't sound like a 6-string.
If anyone knew weird minor chords… It was Joni.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/tab/tuning.html
Edited to add: Also check out Lindsey's teacher, Mary Timony (fronted Helium before becoming a solo act).
Note that these are also tuned down a half step from how the songs on their first self titled LP (not to be confused with their second or third self titled LP) were originally recorded due to Mike’s vocal range changing over 20 years.
https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/1723/why-is-the-gu...
Include a few other tunings (drop d and below, dadgad, the more popular open tunings) and you can bump that up to 99%.
On the group of 3 smallest strings, and the next group over, the shapes are all very reachable by the hand.
On the thicker string groups, the shapes require a wider spread of the hand — especially the half-diminished triad.
The smaller, more comfortable shapes on the thinner strings are made possible by the kink between the G and B strings.
Same for banjo: https://zeppmusic.com/banjo/aktuning.htm
Once you play guitar for long enough you will understand why that major third is there, though. A small compromise in the “logic” of the tuning gives you so much utility.