We have scales but why??

[izonin]

Lakshminarayanan Shankar plays a 5-string double neck electric violin.

[robogone]

But does he know Stairway to Heaven?

[Acid Mitch]

But does he know Stairway to Heaven?

Yeah, he looked at it and thought "f**k climbing that , I'm taking the lift".(elevator to all you Americans)

[izonin]

Shakti played no elevator music.

[egbert]

no you actually do bow them and listen to the beating. That is really how you do it. You will not find 1 violinist that tunes the way you just described using the low string to tune the high. It makes no rational sense when you can use the actual string that was previously tuned and use the precise beating method to get it perfect.

I think I see what the problem is here. You are familiar with a concrete practical situation which you know. You cannot imagine any other. This is not a thread about what goes on in the orchestra pit, it a thread about theoretical ideas about scales and tunings. Run along and play somewhere else.

And a 5 string violin or cello is so esoteric that to make a point with such a rare instrument is sort of weird. And that fabled notion of bach's 6th being written for a 5 string cello is considered a myth. There is no evidence for the claim.

That is crap. The piece is unplayable on a four string without thumb position technique which had not been developed at that time. All the unisons on open E and the stopped E on the A string (eg Bar 23 in the prelude) are suddenly easy on the 5 string instrument and the Barenreiter edition includes a note on the prelude thus:
Ms fugt dem titel bei: "a cinque accordes" and gives the tuning of the 5 strings (accordes) as C G D A from the regular cello and the E above.

I don't need to use google as my information comes from the actual source. I trust that more than google.

And what did Johann Sebastian say to you about all this when you inquired? Perhaps you can connect me with some of my dead relatives too?

I would say your reliance on google is symptomatic of a very small understanding of a complex topic.

I didn't say that I rely on Google - I suggested that since you cannot imagine that there is such a thing as what I have sitting in front of me here you might need some help from a body of knowledge - you know book larnin' and all that. The fact that you consider your own ignorance a basis to challenge what others say speaks volumes about the tininess of your mind.

I work with orchestras on a daily basis.

In what capacity? Do you drive the bus?

Nobody tunes the way you describe.

I could not care less. I was in no way offering guidance to gigging musicians on how to tune an instrument they don't even possess in a noisy orchestra pit and only a moron would assume that I was.

Guitarists , well lets be honest, they don't have to be as exact as an orchestral player. They aren't blending with 70 other musicians as a result they can and are usually out of tune.

And now you are really talking out your heiny. String players do not have perfect intonation in an orchestral context. They are slightly out of time and slightly out of tune and the sum off all these imperfectons generates a massive "chorus" effect which is actually desirable.

Guitarists are often playing completely exposed - not masked by other instruments - and they frequently have sustaining chords ringing on which make intonation problems obvious. But again this has got nothing to do with the point of my post.

But you were talking about stringed instruments. Your point assumes that the lowest and highest are tuned by perfect 5ths therefore they should be harmonics of each other.

This is just bizarre. I just pointed out the opposite. Two ways of tuning to integral ratios produced divergent results. That was my point. I can't see how you got from there to what you just stated.

That doesn't quite work that way because 99.9% of people playing strings have a 4 string violin.

Are you just trying to wind me up or are you really as thick as this last sentence of your brilliant post would suggest?

[NKF]

lol

nope. I think you will find the use of 5 string violins rather sparse. I would say most sales of violins are within that percentage in terms of 4 stringed versions. What i do with orchestras ? I am a composer orchestrator conductor and i actually don't have a driver's licence so definitely not a bus driver.

Regarding your Bach piece, the problem is that there are no official manuscripts, researchers tend to think it was played by a type of violin not a cello. let lone a 5 string cello. And lastly, many think they were studies that were never actually played at all.

Why you are focusing on such a rare instrument is still curious.

And that chorus effect will happen by phase alone, tuning really is not much a part of that desired chorus effect. If you think a guitar player is more in tune than orchestral players, i don't really know what to say. A guitar by virtue of frets is never in tune. There is a compromise which is why guitars have a different system of tuning than violins.

And even if we assume everyone is rocking a 5 string, it makes no difference. You don't tune those lowest string and the highest string together. Further more The fact that it isn't a harmonic makes no difference. The concept does not require that the fundamental be a harmonic. None of the strings at least their fundamentals are harmonics of the string used to tune them.I mean you do get that each fundamental is not a harmonic of the preceding string ? none of them are.

[izonin]

A guitar by virtue of frets is never in tune.

This one is.

[pj geerlings]

Admittedly trivial observations regarding the Cycles of fifths

first 5 = C G D A E
Align within the Octave of C
C D E G A == C Major pentatonic

first 7 = C G D A E B F#
Align within the Octave of G
G A B C D E F# == G Major Scale

[egbert]

Admittedly trivial observations regarding the Cycles of fifths

first 5 = C G D A E
Align within the Octave of C
C D E G A == C Major pentatonic

first 7 = C G D A E B F#
Align within the Octave of G
G A B C D E F# == G Major Scale

And this is the lydian mode for C - which I gather has some implications for theory. There is a book which I have yet to read and I have often wondered if it relates to the point you just made. If anyone can paraphrase what Russell is on about I would be interested to hear it.

Edit: I just had a quick peruse of the article in wikipedia which is pretty much saying what I expected. Is this what you were getting at PJ?

[egbert]

Lakshminarayanan Shankar plays a 5-string double neck electric violin.

Shankar has an amazing sound - he played with John McLaughlin in electric and acoustic bands in the 70s and early 80s. Jean Luc Ponty, Nigel Kennedy, Nigel Maclean (Australian trained at Berklee) - amongst a few others that I have seen playing 5 string electric live with a band. Those guys all have or have had absolutely top class chops on classical instruments and have used the extended range of the 5 string electic instrument to great effect. Ponty also played Baritone violin with Zappa and others - using a 4 string Barcus Berry electric tuned down one octave.

[pj geerlings]

Many years ago I lived next door to a guy named Irv Wilson - he gave me a brief but intense lesson on the origin of scales.

One concept in the western world was to fully utilize a system based strictly on the 3rd harmonic - hence the cycle of fifth examples I gave ...

If one extends the cycle of fifths from C back around to C (and dividing each note's frequency back into the "root" octave where needed) you get a final frequency that is agonizingly close to the original. It's only off by about 23.46 cents; the so-called Pythagorean Comma.

By shrinking the Perfect Fifth 1.955 cents we get the 12 tone chromatic scale we have come to know and well ... you can decide the rest

[robogone]

A guitar by virtue of frets is never in tune.

This one is.

I knew I should never have taken that acid on a school night...

[NKF]

By shrinking the Perfect Fifth 1.955 cents we get the 12 tone chromatic scale we have come to know and well ... you can decide the rest

on the piano

orchestras don't use that tuning. It is a limitation for the piano and other instruments. And orchestra can and does play perfect intervals. Perhaps why orchestral players can tell a real 5th while most others can't. There was a chromatic scale before there was equal tuning.

[izonin]

That's interesting. What about the pieces for piano and orchestra, or for guitar and flute? I've always thought that equal is the new standard.

[JumpingJackFlash]

The traditional western tuning systems were based on the harmonic series

It's worth pointing out that the harmonic series was not discovered or described until the eighteenth century, so any implication of early musicians being consciously aware of this is woefully ahistorical.

what happens when you take a resonating string, and reduce its length to half, one third, one quarter, etc. of the original. This is the basic-basic of ALL tuning, and the way people have created music without knowing jack shit about mathematics or even what a frequency is.

Interesting question: What was the very first instrument?
Think about it.


Probably the voice. People "sung" long before they were capable of measuring the lengths of strings (or anything else for that matter). (The second instrument was probably untuned percussion which is obviously irrelevant as far as scales are concerned).

According to some music historians, Bach's "Wohltemperiertes Klavier" was not based on the equal temperament.

Indeed. It has recently been ascertained that Bach's "wohltemperirt" did not mean equal temperament (although people at the time certainly knew about ET, it was not preferred). Bach's WTC was written for a unique irregular temperament which worked in a wide variety of keys, but did not mean that each key was the same (as in ET).

It's interesting how people throughout history (and some even today) argue that some keys sound darker or sadder than others; objectively, in ET this is not possible. These kind of descriptions can only refer to temperaments other than ET (even if the people making them are not aware of it).

Incidentally, at the other end of the scale (no pun intended), Just Intonation has its own problems; for one, it requires almost impossible flexibility such that almost no instrumental ensemble music involving wind (or keyboard) players could ever have been intended to be performed so.

As I said, people have known about ET for centuries, but it was not until around 1917 that ET became the "universal standard" we have today (which is not to say it's the best system by any means). In the scheme of things, that's very recent indeed.