Can guitar frets perform multiplication?(charlespetzold.com) |
Can guitar frets perform multiplication?(charlespetzold.com) |
Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
I’m curious about Steve’s banjo. He usually ( but not always ) plays in Scruggs style, which should result in wear on the head down by where the pinky is anchored. But this banjo shows wear up above the strings, where a clawhammer player usually shows wear.
Either this is one of Steve’s clawhammer practice banjos or the wear is from a previous owner, I’d guess.
Discussed about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356314 (196 comments)
Frets used to just be thick material (wire, strips of flexible wood or treated cord) tied around the neck of the instrument. They were added, moved and removed for different scales, and "tuning" might have involved choosing fret positions that sat well with other instruments that could not be tuned, etc.
They were inherently movable. Sitar frets still are tied to the neck this way.
You can do this yourself with cable ties which make tolerable frets for experimental purposes.
So this would have allowed the knowledge of precise tuning to evolve over time.
Movable frets (they kind that you describe) used to be guts. Just like strings used to be.
A viola da gamba still has tied frets, made from the same material as the strings -- cattle or sheep intestines. Among other things, movable frets mean you can tweak things for intonation and temperament. I've seen instruments that had double frets, so you could play in more than one temperament.
If you had perfect pitch (maybe relative pitch is enough) then couldn't you just make marks in each position on the fretboard where it sounds like a new full note, and then go back and listen for the half-notes and do the same thing?
(Top, yellow slider, cannot be interacted with):
https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html
Sources (such as they are):
One day he called me with a fascinating question. He was making his first guitar, and he wanted to know: Where do I put the frets?
As an aside, I love the simplicity of the interactive elements in TFA. Something I desperately wish I could have done with the side-by-side Galilean and modern guitars was instead of strumming at the actual fret on a given string to get the note to which that fret corresponded, be able to place "fret holders" by clicking at the intersection of the string and the fret that held the string down at that fret for you and then simply strumming the open strings so that you could compare how chords sound between the two guitars.
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.
“One of the themes of The Lost Art of Logarithms is that many phenomena in our natural and human-made world can be interpreted logarithmically. That includes music but it does not include guitar frets.”
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold
Some reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44882.Code