>>>>> 2. Alternate tunings. Well sort of. ...The limitation is that it
absolutely must be equally spaced tunings. That may be boring to some
For anyone 'hankering' to play with alternate tunings, let me just give a
couple of words of advice.
Ignore "Quarter-Tone Tuning." Sounds like a great idea, right? Twice as many
notes? Twice as many sonic possibilities? So why does it sound so awful? As
Carlos often points out, just dropping another note equally between two
other imperfect intervals just doubles the error. Quarter tone is a dead
end. Everyone tries that first and gets dismayed by new tunings in general.
As far as equally-spaced intervals that do NOT number 12 per octave, 19 is
the only "reasonable" one, and I recommend it highly. It has a weird, eerie
sound to it, yet you can get your feet wet slowly because most of the
sonorous intervals still fall pretty close to what we're used to. You have
to do boat-loads of math to see this in action, but just trust me. Or use a
CAD program to draw two concentric circles, and then divide one equally by
12 and the other by 19 and see how close most of the lines fall.
The next good sounding, equally-tempered tunings don't occur until up in the
low thirties, I think, which is not for the faint of heart, but 19-tone
tunings are loads of fun.
Pop on Carlos' "Beauty in the Beast," soon to be remastered on CD, and get
psyched!
In my adventurous youth, I created many banks of sounds for my Mirage DSK-8,
ESQ-M and TX-81Z using 19 tone. The nice thing about ET tunings is that you
can often get them by biasing or by altering the oscillators' response to
the control. Then you just need to make that strip of paper with the weirdo
note names so you know what you're doing: "C, C#, Dd, D, E..." (because in
19-tone, C# and D-flat are two different notes).