Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Fomhorach on September 21, 2016 at 1:47am

Lever activated bridge changer?

Wow. That's a great concept. Push down on a springed lever and the bridge drops down to play from the one at the rear, or up to add a new bridge. Or a rolling floating bridge.

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on September 21, 2016 at 4:19am

It's called a vibrato unit...

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Permalink Reply by Fomhorach on September 21, 2016 at 11:13am

Vibratos have 2 bridges?

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on September 21, 2016 at 2:17pm

They have a multiplicity of them, by rotating the single bridge. You can even get locking vibrato units that you can lock detuned.

Or you can install a B- or G-bender...

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Permalink Reply by Cause the Blue rat on September 21, 2016 at 3:51pm

I seen a video where someone was playing a bass guitar with auto detuning tuners and bridge. He could get all kinds of different tunings by flipping a few switches. 

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Permalink Reply by Regan on September 21, 2016 at 7:43pm

Not sure what your talking about Ron,,,, never seen multiple bridges on a guitar before, with or without vibrato,,,,, b or g benders have nothing to do with bridges either really. In fact what I meant has nothing to do with pitch bending of any sort :)

What I was referring to was a secondary bridge that could be levered into place to throw the intonation off enough to create stanky notes. You could also use it to switch to a weird scale tone of any number of notes under 12 by installing it so when its levered into action it comes into contact at twice the measurement of the amount of notes you want per octave,,,, for example: measure the distance to the tenth fret, double it and place the bridge there,, then you will have 10 notes per octave instead of 12.

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on September 21, 2016 at 9:01pm

Ah. I see. Kinda like finger tapping, but in reverse. Sorta. The idea being that you are changing the bridge end node of the string...hmmm. If you finger tapped a fretless guitar, you could get stanly notes. See, I think that all the mechanical leverage in the world won't replace what you could conceivably do with your fingers. Another vision I had of what you're maybe suggesting sounds similar to what Rat sez he saw. Mayyyybeee, it could be something, instead of a fixed bridge for all strings, you have individual, slidable / adjustable-along-the-string-length bridges for each string. Kinda like changing the intonation to wherever you want it. Which is why I think this would be perhaps better doable on a fretless. If you did it on a fretted guitar of, say, an initial 25.5" scale,mthough, you'd definitely get some weird into nations by moving each individual bridge forward or back by more than a few mm. Hmmm. Is that what you're thinking about?

Permalink Reply by JL on September 20, 2016 at 11:58pm

A) clarification that music theory is just labels for "what feels right in the heart" so that you can communicate it to someone else,

i.e. do-ray-me^fa-so-la-ti^do gets the label "diatonic"  and do^do#^ray^ray#^me^fa^fa#^so^so#^la^la#^ti^do gets the label "chromatic".\

B) and an idea for a wrong that's right ... diatonic fretted minor scale instead of the standard major scale.

la-ti^do-ray-me^fa-so-la

the trick to playing it to remember that what you are used to starts on the 3rd fret "do" and gives you -2 notes before it for fun..

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Permalink Reply by Fomhorach on September 21, 2016 at 12:46am

This sounds like what's going on with a dulcimer fretboard or a similar way of constructing what notes are played (I might be wrong here). 

Technically you could take a normal fretboard and rip out frets to construct something that would force a player to only be able to play those notes. It's not quite what I'm thinking about. 

I read somewhere that pianos are not tuned accurately and there is a flattening of the keyboard the more distance there is between the notes. There's also the fact that guitars are not accurate too. Blues and jazz musicians used this to combine harmonies of major and minor scales that although should produce disharmony, don't because the ear hears them as correct.

I also read that micro changing notes on a guitar fretboard is very difficult because it has 5 different open notes and combining the 5 with changing the placement of a single long fret causes more problems harmonically than it solves. So luthiers produced that pure tone fretboard with the wiggly frets.

The thing is though that we build guitars with 2 open notes. We could slightly move different frets that would enhance (say the two outside strings) certain notes and produce that dip in tone for the middle string to produce similar notes to the jazz and blues players, those 'blue' notes,.

If we did it correct, musically, and openly shared how it is done as a standardised method, then instead of emulating a 6 string guitar with 3 strings, we would be creating instruments that sit out on their own right as a particular made instrument with its own sound that can't be emulated by a 6 string.

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Permalink Reply by JL on September 21, 2016 at 6:04am

You are correct, the dulcimer type fret board (Diatonic fretting) rips out the frets for the notes that don't belong to do-ray-me^fa-so-la-ti^do.

the pattern is the same no matter what note you start on.  Tuned to the key of G, or D or even e-flat and the pattern is the same so the fret spacing pattern is the same.

yes, any fretted instrument is a collection of compromises.  fretting the string stretches it sharp, so we slant the bridge away to compensate.  playing the open string is the only time it isn't, so some manufactures move the nut a millimeter closer to the first fret to compensate.  each string is a different thickness with different elasticity reacting differently to being fretted, but we put the frets straight across and call it good enough because 'true tone' frets are just to difficult to do right and way too silly to look at and your ear usually can't hear the difference. the frat layout is based on "even tempered" tuning but the action at the 12th fret is much more than at the 1st fret and causes more "stretched sharp" so we use the open/12 method for setting intonation and call it good enough that fret 5 is a few milicents off.

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Permalink Reply by Fomhorach on September 21, 2016 at 10:06pm

I agree. Fretting a string bends the string so we compromise by setting a generalised intonation at the bridge. I also agree that those wiggly frets are a bit to hard and look a bit silly. But I also know they are wiggly because they are dealing with 6 strings (5 notes) and driving for perfection. 

However the fixed concept for doing this (or reasons for not trying this)  goes out the window with 3 strings (2 notes) as moving a fret on a 6 string changes 5 notes and throws the whole guitar out of intonation. But doing something like this on a 3 stringer might make for musical beneficial properties.

I'm not proposing making a more accurately tonal CBG I'm suggesting that if we combine knowing how this idea works with music theory of how jazz and blues players used 'off' notes, because we deal with 3 strings we could conceivably create a fretboard that has these 'off' notes built into the design. 

This fretboard could be tonaly more accurate in some places than a normal guitar (because we use less strings and even less notes) and deliberately creates "desirable stinky" notes based on "blue notes" that the ear finds difficult to hear as dissonance.

If we worked this out, shared it so it becomes a 'standard' type of build then if any musician wants this type of sound they need to get it built for them as they can't buy it in a shop and it will only work on 3 stringers anyway.

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Permalink Reply by Fomhorach on September 21, 2016 at 10:43pm

OK here's an example of true tone frets for the G and D strings.

Bridge side < --------------------> nut side

We could choose to do the whole fretboard based on the G and have our middle D notes all drop down into flattened notes (it would sound bad but we could do it)

With a little bit of musical know how we could choose to do this only with the 5th and 4th (for example, I haven't looked too deep into the musical side of this) harmonics of the guitar. This would create dropped or flattened 5ths and4ths on our middle string. 

If we get the musical know on the older styles of jazz or blues and find which notes in relation to the scales that the oldies used to get that feel in the music, then we (because we are the ones using 3 strings with 2 notes) would be the only ones able to build this 'character' into the guitar. Repeatable, deliberate, alternative and perhaps (if we get this right) highly desirable.

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