| ▲ | TheOtherHobbes 5 hours ago | |
12tet is a practical compromise between overtone approximation and playability. Any fretted or keyed acoustic instrument with more than 12 notes/octave is extremely difficult and expensive to build and hard to tune and play. The music is also hard to notate, because there are so many more possible pitch positions. So 12 notes became a practical default for instrument builders. And from there, ET became a practical default for tuning to allow smooth-ish modulation through different keys. The errors in the tuning are the same for every key, so the tuning relationships stay the same while the key root changes. That doesn't quite happen because overtone perception and beating effects aren't completely linear. But it avoids the obvious out-of-tune notes you get when playing in distant keys with non-ET tunings. | ||
| ▲ | tzs an hour ago | parent [-] | |
An interesting option for fretted instruments is to build it with 12 regular frets per octave, and then add temporary extra frets if you want to make specific notes more in tune for the key you are in. This was common for lute players in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Lute frets were usually made of the same material as strings and were tied on around the neck, so adding an extra full width fret was not hard. Of course being tied on lute frets were also movable, so they could also reposition the regular 12 frets instead of adding extras. Instead of tying on an extra full width frets another common option was partial frets. They would glue a piece of string or wood under a specific string, to just give an option to play one note with either the regular fret or the more in tone little fret (called a "tastino" (plural is "tastini")). In this video [1] Brandon Acker uses a guitar that his luthier friend was building that had not yet had the frets installed to demonstrate with lute style tied on frets some different 12 tone tunings, then demonstrates using tastini to improve specific notes, such as little fret on the G string a little before the first regular fret so that G♯ and A♭ can be different notes. The tastini he uses in the video are simply pieces of string held on with a piece of tape, so quick and easy to add and remove. | ||