This is absolutely fascinating to me as a musician. I use a lot of micro bends while playing guitar, but really didn't have a grasp of the theory - now I am curious what the cent intervals are that I am playing :). While this is pretty technical and dense in places, your obvious mastery of and enthusiasm for this subject kept me enthralled. The links you provided in the comments to example performances in some of these alternate tunings really made what you are talking about come to life. If I had a suggestion it would be to move those links into the body of your post so each example is right there with your text on that tuning; I didn't see your examples in the comments till I had finished the post and I think it would have been nice to pull up an example to listen to the tuning while reading about it. I seriously hope you post a video of you playing that monstrosity of a keyboard (Tonal Plexus), that is intimidating just to look at!
You are really inspiring me. I think I am going to try tuning my harp to some of these other scales and see what happens :) Thank you for putting in the time and energy, this post is a beast!
Much love - Carl "Totally Not A Bot" Gnash / @carlgnash
Click the badge to learn more about
Human Certified Original Works
What a wonderful response! I will do my best to take your excellent advice. Also I will have more to say in future on this range of topics — next I will probably tackle .scl file format.
Chris Vaisvil removed the frets from a guitar, backfilled the the fret slots, and added cable ties as mobile, removable frets that he could position for just about any small octave divisor. He plays the resulting guitar in this video, which is his work, not mine. Text under the video includes how-to links and info.
Oh what a cool idea! That is so simple and flexible, dang, that seriously is making me think about doing that with one of my "extra" guitars (which I already keep in alternate tunings, but still in the normal scale).