I've been thinking about correctly building a 'wrong' guitar.
This isn't to do with looks. Anything can hold a vibrating string, from the most beautiful crafted bit of wood to.. well, a bit of wood :)
It's about the fretboard.
It would be easy to just put all the frets in the wrong places randomly but how would you guys make something deliberately wrong so that the music produced from it is just slightly 'wrong' but in all the right ways?
I'm just making this up and freewheeling to see what you guys think. Eg.. 'Make the third, fifth and tenth fret flat with the fifth fret slanted so the bass string is correct but the high sting is sharp'
As builders we can create a whole new way of reaching a guitar 'sound' that is unique, and capable of being reproduced.
Does anyone get why I'm talking about?
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Don't give up! No one ever said this was a bad idea. From your opening post on this idea's got my head spinning. This is one of the coolest ideas I've seen on this forum. There is a lot of possibilities here.
There was a discussion in the past about frets in the wrong place. Memory isn't the best on this but I think it when something around these lines. Builder was disappointed he'd gotten a few frets wrong. Someone then posted that these wrong frets would give the guitar that 'sound' this is definitive of a cigar box guitar. Hand made, slightly off folk art. In a nutshell each time those notes would be played you would get that slightly 'off' sound. Perhaps you've already heard what your looking for on this site. On a video or by playing a sound bite. Go for it.
A whammy bar would give you microtones. But you would have to memorize their tuning to get it right. Just like a western scale a microtonal scale would have to be played in pitch. Slight variances would be out of tune. Just like in a western scale.
Violins are a middle eastern instrument. Their fretless design gives way to all the microtonal music from that region. As with any fretless instrument you would have to be completely familiar with the tuning to get it right.
You could double the frets on a standard western guitar. Have 24 frets in the same space as 12 by starting with the 12th fret as your measurements from the nut. Probably a bit hard to play above the 12th fret. Because your able to tune it like a standard guitar you could play along with everyone. Then toss in the microtones when you want.
That's OK.
I'm convinced. None of it makes any sense.
When it comes to microtuning a fretboard we lack the skill, we shouldn't bother anyway, it's not worth the effort, it's been done before, it shouldn't be done because the fretboard is right, we can bend the strings with either our fingers or a whammy bar and it makes no musical sense to look into it.
I will just be strange and experiment with it anyway.
Just because I like to bend rules.
No problem.
:)
I didn't say not to experiment, if you want to really do this. Go ahead. Heck, make it steam powered. Make it beautiful.
I might be missing something, but wouldn't a whammy bar give you that occasional 'bent out of tune' note?
It's not about hard wiring a bent note into the fretboard.
That would be too much of a change.
The idea started off with me thinking about the character of a stinky guitar with the fretboard just 'off' a little bit. Maybe it has a couple of wonky frets perhaps 1mm off because of a dodgy pencil line or a wobbly saw. It's still playable and has a character all of its own. It can sit right into a song and sounds unique. It's got its own tiny imperfections that add to its charm and appeal
Can we recreate this on purpose in a certain way that it becomes a certain type of tuning?
All the theory of microtuning works on a CBG because we are dealing with 2 notes played on 3 strings. We don't need wobbly frets to do this, we just need to figure out which frets to change so that the 2 outside strings (both the same notes) are actually micro tuned to be more perfectly harmonic on purpose because that micro tuning at that point actually produces a flat note in a desired place, just ever so flat enough that you don't really notice but it adds a unique 'character' to the instrument.
It can be something that is unique to 3 stringed instruments because a 4-5-6 stringed instrument can't achieve this effect without throwing all the other strings out of tune at that fret.
We can do it on purpose as a flavour to that build.
http://www.cigarboxnation.com/forum/topics/follow-up-a-new-apartmen...
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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