PROGRESS REPORT:

NEW MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND TUNING SYSTEMS

IVOR DARREG

Public attitudes are changing in many sectors, and while music has lagged behind other arts and human occupations in this respect, we seem to be finally catching up. Let's take a look at the Do-It-Yourself Movement. Not too many years ago, people sent out to the plumber, the electrician, the painter, for every little job. Today, they are more than apt to do many of these jobs themselves, and shop for power tools and all kinds of supplies that used to be thought of as exclusively for this or that trade. Doing it yourself started as more or less hobby, and now has become serious business. Profitable business for all concerned. How does this connect with Music? Very simple: in the old days you bought a piano, which was made in a huge factory by people you would never see. You took it for granted, quite as if pianos grew on trees. You had no control over how your piano sounded, and its care was the exclusive province of a highly-trained tuner technician. Every composer had to be a pianist, and every student of other instruments had to start with the piano. This was a kind of Religion.

The image of past glories still endures, and many people pretend it's still 1850. Now, you can't make a piano at home, and so it is impossible to change its design for our new kinds of music. But look at all the guitars today: they come in many shapes and sizes, and some people can make their own at home, and many more people run out and buy special parts -- or cosmetic decoratings for customizing. You don't have to take what's standard: you can change it, just like the local speed demon down the street who customizes his car. With electric guitars you have even more options, such as special pickups and even effects built inboard. The Now Generation is getting into electronics and computers, and so the options for new music are mind-boggling! You can build your own electronic organ at home; you can assemble a synthesizer; or you can modify a stock item.

So let's leave the concert grand and the symphony orchestra to the Nostalgia Escapists, and do our own thing, not Bach's or Beethoven's. Two hundred years is a long time to be bound by Tradition, however good or esteemed. We might as well question certain assumptions that have been around that long. Along with some other persons, I have done something about it: and if I could, you can too. A good way to start is refretting guitars.

Standard guitars are fretted to 12 tones per octave, conforming exactly to the keyboard of the piano or organ. Why twelve? Because it's the simplest and cheapest way of tuning an instrument to fixed pitches that will produce any worthwhile music. Not because it's the best; but because it would cost too much to make organs or pianos in some other scale, and because tradition has frozen tuning-methods as rigidly as it has determined the fretting of guitars. Your local friendly rock group practices pitch-bending -- fighting against those rigid frets by stretching a string to a slightly higher pitch. They also use bottleneck sliders to get pitches between the frets. Some synthesizers make provision for bending tones. So the desire is there. What happens if we systematize the bending? We can do this by yanking out the old frets and installing new ones? But where? How many? Well, that depends.

The 12-tone temperament is a scheme for distorting all musical intervals (octaves are distorted in practice if not in theory) to create a symmetrical pattern. Thousands of composers over centuries hav? exhausted the possibilities of this system, so many people today resort to noise or extreme freaky tone-qualities. So it's a matter of pride now: I am a composer and would like to do what has not been done before, or at least not done before in this same way. So I investigated the various scales and came up with an exciting new idea: Certain of the possible new scales have NEW MOODS. Now there are enough possibilities to go around.

For harmony and most new tunes, try these: 17 19 22 24 and 31 tones per octave. These can all be done on guitars by changing the frets, since I have compiled fretting tables. New electronic instruments can be tuned to them, and there are electronic tuning devices to make this possible for average persons. Marimbas and metal bars and other instruments can be made. Most of this is within the reach of the do-it-yourselfer.

Other scales such as 5 10 14 15 tones per octave may not be as harmonious, but have special uses and instruments can be built in them. After that the sky is the limit. Also there is what is called just intonation, an untempered undistorted scale. This brings calm to our restless world. One way to get into just tunings is the steel guitar. Now the frets become painted lines. They can even be on interchangeable cards under the strings. But most of you may think of the steel guitar as a very limited instrument, used for trivia. I have done something about that also! I have built what I call the Megalyra -- 6 to 8 feet long and going down into the bass and giving the performer a real Power Trip. Smaller versions of this can have various chords and many more strings than a regular steel guitar, and they are within the capabilities of home workshops and small firms. Now it gets more interesting: putting both conventional and new fret-lines on these instruments, one creates a visual pattern in colors, rather like a Mondrian or Kandinsky Totem Pole (these instrtiments will stand erect as well as lie down).

With ubiquitous tape and cassette machines, it is now possible for the composer to have the same status as the painter or sculptor: the composer no longer has to be at the mercy of orchestras and conductors and concert managers and temperamental performers. Since nearly all performers are trained Ionly for the music of DEAD composers, who can't talk back, they dismiss today's living composers as too difficult and thus prevent any musical progress. Now the composer can be the performer also, by improvisation; and overdubbing is possible so that the composer can play all the parts in any scale whatever, thus avoiding any problems of forcing any performer to go against his indoctrination and training for music of the past. If the new music happens to be beyond the technical limitations of ten fingers, then we have computers and automatic instruments. With modern audio equipment, the LISTENER gains some of the powers of a performer, since every playback of a tape can be individually different.