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My main reason for buying a fretless guitar in the first place was to explore just intonation. It keeps getting bumped down the priority list, though. I've, unfortunately, never owned a synth capable of setting up tuning tables. Oh, and I just remembered another option for making it more performable (extended just intonation on guitar, that is): the ol' nylon fret trick. The hardest part is fine-tuning the intonation of the frets (and getting used to the back of the neck being 'ribbed'). Hmmm, maybe I need to devise a project to move things up the priority list. Perhaps an installation along the lines of La Monte Young... Cheers, Jon Southwood On 6/21/05, David Beardsley <db@biink.com> wrote: > Jon Southwood wrote: > > > > > Melodically, you'd probably want to reduce the ratios to within an > > octave or at least within a couple octaves. This is similar to a > > technique used by any number of composers working in Just Intonation: > > 7:1 becomes 7:4 so that it falls between 1:1 and 2:1 (or 1/1 and 2/1). > > It'd take me a lot of practice on my fretless guitar to be able to > > reliably play intervals of 13/11 or 11/7 or (gulp) 89/47. This is > > where Csound or other computer music programs become invaluable. > > You could just buy a cheap hardware synth. That's how we did it in the > old days. > Or tune the open strings of a guitar with a tuner, loop it and play > along with the fretless. > And suddenly it's not a case of a lot of practice, but a little >experience. > > 89/47 is 1105.373 cents. Not too far from a 1100 cent 12tet M7th. > > I used to do MIDI composition that had loads of ratios and rhythms, > I stopped that when I started getting performances. I started getting > minimal > when the performances sucked and I started performing with a guitar > controller > and microtonal synth letting go of the rhythmic possibilities. > > Tuning with ratios makes a better connection with the listener. > > >-- > >* David Beardsley > >* microtonal guitar > >* http://biink.com/db > > > >