As I enjoyed David Beardley's video "Microtonal Guitar..." I stumbled
into this other video that I have seen and liked a lot in the past. It
is a guy with a guitar that has adjustable frets so he can adjust it
to any microtonal scale and the point is that he explains about
microtonal scales in a great way, gives a sort of excellent
introduction to the field. My own interest in micrtonality emerged out
of frustration with the guitar and as I picked up wind isntruments on
the side I noticed that when not held back by the rigid mechanics of
frets you tend to intonate certain notes in a scale differently - and
"better" as you do it according to your own taste rather than the
instrument's limitations. Now, when the guy in this video talks about
just intonation and pure intervals he is spot on topic from a live
looping point of view. This is because when we kick in Half Speed,
Double Speed or any speed or pitch shifting it is a pure a
mathematical transformation. Looping devices doesn't compensate by
sometimes delivering a little twisted fifths in order to make thirds
sound fuller. I remember Henry Kaiser talked about this at YK7, using
a delay device with squarewave modulated frequency, and now I've heard
he has gotten a guitar with a True Temperament fretting set up to
match this. Neat! BTW the global microtonal library in Logic is why I
like using an EWI with those synths. And there's a lot of fun in
fiddling with microtonal scales by ear. Metasynth supports it in a
powerful way, if you are inclined towards electronic composition and
Alchemy is has a cool live player's interface that include micro
scales as well as a good arpeggioator.
Anyway, here's the URL to the video:
http://youtu.be/yhdpsuXtewYGreetings from Sweden
Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com
www.looproom.com internet music hub
