9 ms·

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the p

I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that. I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rare trinary intersection. It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound. It's the same old Square and Saw waves with the same instruments we have had for hundreds of years. Sadly i think musicianship has all but died in Gen Z, quantization / pitch correction / take splicing / overuse of compression are rampant, and every popular artist is basically as fake as Milli Vanilli. Protools has raised a generation of lazy and uncreative musicians with awful rhythm. Get off my lawn! Ok i'm done.

mping 6y ago
Check Jacob Collier if you haven't already. He is really pushing it, he has a song where he changes the temperament during the song (sorry if this imprecise/wrong). He is kinda like a musical prodigy. Not my cup of tea but I do recognize he is very refreshing.
- ageitgey 6y ago
  Jacob Collier has tricks like using how many cents out of tune certain chords are in equal temperament from just intonation to find a sequence of chords that modulate to a half-sharp key without it ever sounding out of tune: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magical-chords/ https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magica... That's just the beginning. He posts long breakdowns of his tracks on YouTube explaining everything he does in detail. He's not only a musical virtuoso, but he's incredibly adept at recording and Apple's Logic/tech in general, so he's able to blend those skills seamlessly. With Jacob and others getting people interested in tunings and unusual harmony, there are now lots of people on YouTube creating music that exploits shifting tunings or alternate systems like 24TET, etc. So to the grandparent post, don't worry - there has never been a time when so many young people are playing with and exploiting tuning systems to create interesting music.
  - mping 6y ago
    Nice article, thanks!
baddox 6y ago
What do you mean by “self adjusting just intonation”? Presumably you would need to sequence the desired key changes in your song, because I don’t think you’re going to want software to attempt that automatically. And it can get more complicated than that. I can imagine songs where you would want a melody note in one key to be sustained while the rest of the harmony transitions around it into a new key, which is also something that I can’t imagine being done automatically right now.
globular-toast 6y ago
The Access Virus C I owned several years ago could automatically adjust major and minor thirds to be "perfect", but only when played as a chord. It made a big difference.
progre 6y ago
> It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound. I don't know this to be true, I see people building weird musical instruments all the time. As for electronic sounds (it's not always digital) the modular community is absoultely teeming with expression. Here are some fun guys: https://youtu.be/AGN5N4vn5Bs https://youtu.be/AGN5N4vn5Bs https://youtu.be/DKSr8CE7600 https://youtu.be/DKSr8CE7600
- _0ffh 6y ago
  Yes, also: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx74vAHCehhLOeQNwbJcGyQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx74vAHCehhLOeQNwbJcGyQ
isolli 6y ago
Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out. [0] http://www.garygarrett.me/?page_id=1922 http://www.garygarrett.me/?page_id=1922 [1] https://youtu.be/jA1C9VFqJKo https://youtu.be/jA1C9VFqJKo
zozbot234 6y ago
> I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation This is not possible with purely technological means. To "retune" and "adjust" even a single piece of music in a way that approaches just intervals you'd need an in-depth analysis of all meaningful dissonances, consonances, modulations, perhaps repetitions/imitations etc. etc. in the actual piece; and these are often not even evident from the actual notes because all music uses ornamentation at a variety of levels, hence lots of judgment calls are involved in the process. Where instruments are easy to retune in a flexible way (not really true of guitars, due to the use of physical frets) and the actual music allows for it, performers do use alternatives to equal temperament, such as a variety of "meantone" temperaments.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jonnypotty 6y ago
You need to look into modern electronic instruments my friend. Micro tuning is a big thing. The way people play with timing and groove now is freer than ever due to the influence of hip hop on electronic music. The modern modular scene is way beyond just the old saw and square waves. Sure we keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum but there are a lot of interesting things out there.
- hashkb 6y ago
  > keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum Yes, but almost nobody is dropping raw 808 kick samples onto their tracks. Even though it's a "traditional sound", usually artists do quite a bit of work to transform it. Kind of like what, you know, "real" composers do with "real" musical traditions.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Microtonal music really isn't hard to find. It's just not very popular, because it's too niche for mainstream listeners. And most popular VSTs - Serum, Pigments, Massive, Phaseplant - all use wavetables and not 'the same old square and saw waves.' Modern pop really isn't any more generic than 30s/40s jazz, 50s rock and roll and bubblegum, and so on. That's why it's called popular music and not experimental music.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Modern pop is more generic because the song you hear in the recording is not really played on real instruments or sang by a real person. The samples that were used to create it might have been, but they've been completed deconstructed and then reassembled in ProTools. Even considering the stuff that Queen did for tracks like Bohemian Rhapsody where they used dozens of layered tracks isn't really the same thing. They used that layering to create a sound that wasn't possible, otherwise. But the tracks themselves were made from recording real people playing real instruments. Modern pop, in comparison, is just about commoditization, slapping out a track at as little cost as possible. Everything gets lined up on a rigid beat grid, neutering any texture or feel in the song. Rick Beato has a great video on what exactly is going on and why there actually is a significant difference with "post-ProTools" pop from previous years. https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc
- thanatropism 6y ago
  There's a def "greatest hits" effect with jazz. I mean, how awesome is "Minnie the Moocher", etc. There's also a "trailblazer" effect which is kind of weird because it doesn't happen in classical music. Namely that we listen a lot more to Miles Davis and Coltrane than the random swing band of their age. Heck, Miles gets more props than the sublime big band swing of Duke Ellington.
  - deirdresm 6y ago
    Honestly, out of all the things I've been paid for over the many years of my career, the one that gives the the most pleasure, thinking back, is being paid as an extra for The Blues Brothers. Watching Cab Calloway do Minnie the Moocher in the 70s? Live? Paid for it? Priceless. Working for Apple was awesome, as were the other places I've worked, but for sheer enjoyment per dollar, the Palladium in the 70s wins.
titzer 6y ago
Blues, not metal or rock, is absolutely full of microtonal wails and chirps and wiggles and vibrato, and fret pressure very much gives way to a whole new way to think about the strings; not something to press down like a button at exactly perpendicular force to delicately or firmly contact the frets, but strings are something to be grabbed, ripped, whipped, twisted behind the frets. Add to that a hard attack can whiplash a string out of tune by another 10 cents, and we are talking about making this thing a voice, not some synthesized keyboard doodad. It's a human soul wailing. That's the blues.
- DerDangDerDang 6y ago
  Not metal? Go listen to some of Dimebag Darrell’s solos. They sound ridiculously bad if played in whole semitones. Fair enough, he’s fairly bluesy. But other genres of metal give the distinction you give the left hand to the right too - variations in pick attack wildly change the sound. I’m guessing it’s fair to suggest that similar things exist in all genres of music, and on all instruments.
- hashkb 6y ago
  Not rock? I guess we'd have to know your definition of "rock"... but if you allow "classic" or "progressive" rock into your view, then a lot of those players utilize every aspect of expression on the guitar. And how about the whammy bar? Maybe guitarists aren't consciously using it to untemper their intervals, but to say "rock guitar" is locked to tempered tuning is incorrect.
  - titzer 6y ago
    Sure, I love gritty, classic rock. To the extent that rock was influenced by blues, it has that voice to it. But rock is dead. It died sometime in the 1990s, unfortunately. Metal survived somehow...I'm not really a metal fan, especially very technical stuff, because I find it very...masturbatory. The theory is that the guitar is not an instrument, it's an antenna. It picks up on the energy and mood of the player, all the way down to the stance, the heartbeat, the expression on your face. If you see players like Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Page--and thankfully now there are so many hours of footage of them at our fingertips--they throw their entire body into the performance, completely unafraid. They aren't staring at the fretboard and twiddling out some ridiculously complicated technical thing that (some believe) requires the perfect 45-degree neck angle, a highly mounted guitar, a severe fret-hand reacharound with the thumb on the back of the neck...no, those three I mentioned play mostly by feel. They are hardly looking at the neck, ever, instead enthralled in the whole experience, like a Tennis player watching the ball, not their racket. Contrast them with someone like John Petrucci, an extremely intelligent and cerebral player, with a vast knowledge of musical theory and absolutely excellent technical skills--but then he stands there on stage like he's jerking off with tweezers. (Pardon the imagery, but I can't unsee this after a friend explained it this way to me!)
mellavora 6y ago
Another upvote for modular synth. Andrew (https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/ https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/) has some amazingly cool devices. Chaotic orbits for "waves", running audio through cmos gates to produce pitch changes, running ADSRs through a filter to produce more random envelopes,... and he seems to come up with new module ideas monthly if not more often. My most favorite recent module of his is based on cellular automata. https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/cellular-automata https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/cellular-automata
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
adelrune 6y ago
William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  "Three Ears" looks like the one most relevant to this discussion and is luckily still there.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  I'm not seeing any dead links there? That page has always been a listing of the mp3 files on the physical CD that comes with his book, only some of which were ever put online. BTW, Sethares' research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares goes way beyond tuning music to simple ratios. His whole book is about working with a model of sounds being "in tune" with one another that doesn't just boil down to that.
  - adelrune 6y ago
    A bunch of the examples lead to a 404. Also his research is really mind blowing stuff, I was in disbelief when I heard the first few examples.
hashkb 6y ago
> same old Square and Saw waves You should explore more electronic music. This is either an intentional attack or an ignorant statement. Edit: > musicianship has all but died in Gen Z See South Park S15E07 "You're Getting Old"

mping 6y ago

Check Jacob Collier if you haven't already. He is really pushing it, he has a song where he changes the temperament during the song (sorry if this imprecise/wrong). He is kinda like a musical prodigy. Not my cup of tea but I do recognize he is very refreshing.

ageitgey 6y ago
Jacob Collier has tricks like using how many cents out of tune certain chords are in equal temperament from just intonation to find a sequence of chords that modulate to a half-sharp key without it ever sounding out of tune: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magical-chords/ https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magica... That's just the beginning. He posts long breakdowns of his tracks on YouTube explaining everything he does in detail. He's not only a musical virtuoso, but he's incredibly adept at recording and Apple's Logic/tech in general, so he's able to blend those skills seamlessly. With Jacob and others getting people interested in tunings and unusual harmony, there are now lots of people on YouTube creating music that exploits shifting tunings or alternate systems like 24TET, etc. So to the grandparent post, don't worry - there has never been a time when so many young people are playing with and exploiting tuning systems to create interesting music.
- mping 6y ago
  Nice article, thanks!

baddox 6y ago

What do you mean by “self adjusting just intonation”? Presumably you would need to sequence the desired key changes in your song, because I don’t think you’re going to want software to attempt that automatically. And it can get more complicated than that. I can imagine songs where you would want a melody note in one key to be sustained while the rest of the harmony transitions around it into a new key, which is also something that I can’t imagine being done automatically right now.

globular-toast 6y ago

The Access Virus C I owned several years ago could automatically adjust major and minor thirds to be "perfect", but only when played as a chord. It made a big difference.

progre 6y ago

> It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound. I don't know this to be true, I see people building weird musical instruments all the time. As for electronic sounds (it's not always digital) the modular community is absoultely teeming with expression. Here are some fun guys: https://youtu.be/AGN5N4vn5Bs https://youtu.be/AGN5N4vn5Bs https://youtu.be/DKSr8CE7600 https://youtu.be/DKSr8CE7600

_0ffh 6y ago
Yes, also: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx74vAHCehhLOeQNwbJcGyQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx74vAHCehhLOeQNwbJcGyQ

isolli 6y ago

Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out. [0] http://www.garygarrett.me/?page_id=1922 http://www.garygarrett.me/?page_id=1922 [1] https://youtu.be/jA1C9VFqJKo https://youtu.be/jA1C9VFqJKo

zozbot234 6y ago

> I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation This is not possible with purely technological means. To "retune" and "adjust" even a single piece of music in a way that approaches just intervals you'd need an in-depth analysis of all meaningful dissonances, consonances, modulations, perhaps repetitions/imitations etc. etc. in the actual piece; and these are often not even evident from the actual notes because all music uses ornamentation at a variety of levels, hence lots of judgment calls are involved in the process. Where instruments are easy to retune in a flexible way (not really true of guitars, due to the use of physical frets) and the actual music allows for it, performers do use alternatives to equal temperament, such as a variety of "meantone" temperaments.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jonnypotty 6y ago

You need to look into modern electronic instruments my friend. Micro tuning is a big thing. The way people play with timing and groove now is freer than ever due to the influence of hip hop on electronic music. The modern modular scene is way beyond just the old saw and square waves. Sure we keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum but there are a lot of interesting things out there.

hashkb 6y ago
> keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum Yes, but almost nobody is dropping raw 808 kick samples onto their tracks. Even though it's a "traditional sound", usually artists do quite a bit of work to transform it. Kind of like what, you know, "real" composers do with "real" musical traditions.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

Microtonal music really isn't hard to find. It's just not very popular, because it's too niche for mainstream listeners. And most popular VSTs - Serum, Pigments, Massive, Phaseplant - all use wavetables and not 'the same old square and saw waves.' Modern pop really isn't any more generic than 30s/40s jazz, 50s rock and roll and bubblegum, and so on. That's why it's called popular music and not experimental music.

moron4hire 6y ago
Modern pop is more generic because the song you hear in the recording is not really played on real instruments or sang by a real person. The samples that were used to create it might have been, but they've been completed deconstructed and then reassembled in ProTools. Even considering the stuff that Queen did for tracks like Bohemian Rhapsody where they used dozens of layered tracks isn't really the same thing. They used that layering to create a sound that wasn't possible, otherwise. But the tracks themselves were made from recording real people playing real instruments. Modern pop, in comparison, is just about commoditization, slapping out a track at as little cost as possible. Everything gets lined up on a rigid beat grid, neutering any texture or feel in the song. Rick Beato has a great video on what exactly is going on and why there actually is a significant difference with "post-ProTools" pop from previous years. https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc
thanatropism 6y ago
There's a def "greatest hits" effect with jazz. I mean, how awesome is "Minnie the Moocher", etc. There's also a "trailblazer" effect which is kind of weird because it doesn't happen in classical music. Namely that we listen a lot more to Miles Davis and Coltrane than the random swing band of their age. Heck, Miles gets more props than the sublime big band swing of Duke Ellington.
- deirdresm 6y ago
  Honestly, out of all the things I've been paid for over the many years of my career, the one that gives the the most pleasure, thinking back, is being paid as an extra for The Blues Brothers. Watching Cab Calloway do Minnie the Moocher in the 70s? Live? Paid for it? Priceless. Working for Apple was awesome, as were the other places I've worked, but for sheer enjoyment per dollar, the Palladium in the 70s wins.

titzer 6y ago

Blues, not metal or rock, is absolutely full of microtonal wails and chirps and wiggles and vibrato, and fret pressure very much gives way to a whole new way to think about the strings; not something to press down like a button at exactly perpendicular force to delicately or firmly contact the frets, but strings are something to be grabbed, ripped, whipped, twisted behind the frets. Add to that a hard attack can whiplash a string out of tune by another 10 cents, and we are talking about making this thing a voice, not some synthesized keyboard doodad. It's a human soul wailing. That's the blues.

DerDangDerDang 6y ago
Not metal? Go listen to some of Dimebag Darrell’s solos. They sound ridiculously bad if played in whole semitones. Fair enough, he’s fairly bluesy. But other genres of metal give the distinction you give the left hand to the right too - variations in pick attack wildly change the sound. I’m guessing it’s fair to suggest that similar things exist in all genres of music, and on all instruments.
hashkb 6y ago
Not rock? I guess we'd have to know your definition of "rock"... but if you allow "classic" or "progressive" rock into your view, then a lot of those players utilize every aspect of expression on the guitar. And how about the whammy bar? Maybe guitarists aren't consciously using it to untemper their intervals, but to say "rock guitar" is locked to tempered tuning is incorrect.
- titzer 6y ago
  Sure, I love gritty, classic rock. To the extent that rock was influenced by blues, it has that voice to it. But rock is dead. It died sometime in the 1990s, unfortunately. Metal survived somehow...I'm not really a metal fan, especially very technical stuff, because I find it very...masturbatory. The theory is that the guitar is not an instrument, it's an antenna. It picks up on the energy and mood of the player, all the way down to the stance, the heartbeat, the expression on your face. If you see players like Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Page--and thankfully now there are so many hours of footage of them at our fingertips--they throw their entire body into the performance, completely unafraid. They aren't staring at the fretboard and twiddling out some ridiculously complicated technical thing that (some believe) requires the perfect 45-degree neck angle, a highly mounted guitar, a severe fret-hand reacharound with the thumb on the back of the neck...no, those three I mentioned play mostly by feel. They are hardly looking at the neck, ever, instead enthralled in the whole experience, like a Tennis player watching the ball, not their racket. Contrast them with someone like John Petrucci, an extremely intelligent and cerebral player, with a vast knowledge of musical theory and absolutely excellent technical skills--but then he stands there on stage like he's jerking off with tweezers. (Pardon the imagery, but I can't unsee this after a friend explained it this way to me!)

mellavora 6y ago

Another upvote for modular synth. Andrew (https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/ https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/) has some amazingly cool devices. Chaotic orbits for "waves", running audio through cmos gates to produce pitch changes, running ADSRs through a filter to produce more random envelopes,... and he seems to come up with new module ideas monthly if not more often. My most favorite recent module of his is based on cellular automata. https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/cellular-automata https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/cellular-automata

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

adelrune 6y ago

William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.

ubercow13 6y ago
"Three Ears" looks like the one most relevant to this discussion and is luckily still there.
zozbot234 6y ago
I'm not seeing any dead links there? That page has always been a listing of the mp3 files on the physical CD that comes with his book, only some of which were ever put online. BTW, Sethares' research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares goes way beyond tuning music to simple ratios. His whole book is about working with a model of sounds being "in tune" with one another that doesn't just boil down to that.
- adelrune 6y ago
  A bunch of the examples lead to a 404. Also his research is really mind blowing stuff, I was in disbelief when I heard the first few examples.

hashkb 6y ago

> same old Square and Saw waves You should explore more electronic music. This is either an intentional attack or an ignorant statement. Edit: > musicianship has all but died in Gen Z See South Park S15E07 "You're Getting Old"