On The Structural Relation to Pitch of Instruments

[xRisingForce]

A better title for this thread is: "On the Correlation Between an Instrument's Structure to Pitch."

I saw this picture of a million fret guitar today:

http://music.geocities.jp/tjmthtr/gazo/PAP_0180.JPG

Then I started wondering whether such a concept was plausible.

From convention, the 24 fret hallmark of Jackson and and Dean guitars is realizable through a structural hallmark: the cutaway. What this translates to is in achieving this, the neck isn't augmented in length in moving away from the body, but rather towards it. I'm pretty sure that the distance from the tuning pegs to the bridge is key and consequently reflective of a few things:

1. The distance from the tuning peg to the nut (the white vertical structure directly below the head) along with the distance from the nut to the bridge relates to the length of the neck.
2. A difference in 1 accounts for differences in the distances from fret to fret of two guitars.
3. That differences in fret distance between guitars in general isn't very pronounced accounts for the fact that the respective lengths from tuning peg to bridge of all guitars are very similar.
3. The distance between the consecutive frets is inversely related to an increase in pitch.
4. An increase in tuning-peg-to-bridge length doesn't correlate at all to an increase in range of notes.

String tension in playing an open string on this guitar would be the same as on my 21 fret strat. However, the distance in pitch between the the representive notes of the first and second frets of this guitar is not at all equivocal to my guitar.

Any ideas if something like this could cross over to other instruments as well?

[Nekofrog]

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I have no idea what you are talking about so here are a bunch of waka waka's.

But seriously. What?

[Tensei]

I think this might be a bit too esoteric for people scrolling through here (compare to bluefox-threads). I mean I'm a guitar player and you have me bored for god's sake. I can't imagine any non-guitar players around here would even know what you're talking about.

Also, your pic is broken.

[dPaladin]

Brevity is the soul of wit, bro.

Anyway, if the strings are longer (as I assume they would need to be to have more frets), then they'd have to be thinner to get the same fundamental pitch, right? And wouldn't they have to be tuned more tightly, else you'd end up with... well, slack strings that don't vibrate properly to produce a sound.

I see this becoming impractical very quickly, but:

I don't play guitar.

EDIT: Oh hey, yeah, there's no picture.

[Nekofrog]

http://www.conklinguitars.com/bizarregallery/biz8images/fannedfret3octive8.jpg

Looked into fanned frets.

[danimal cannon]

It feels expensive just looking at that guitar.

[Brithor]

And ugly...

[Tensei]

This thread is now about funny guitars <3


http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk138/TenseiSan/top-gun-guitar.jpg

[Tricklozen]

http://www.dreams2.com/nbcm/gitarren/movie.htm

A guitar with 31 notes per octave.
Pure tone tuning.


I remember Anders Thidell introducing his own guitar concept (http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=1026230) on some Swedish talk show called Eftersnack ("Aftertalk"). The guitar shown there can be picked up and played as a normal guitar, and has 21 frets.

OK, this probably better demonstrates the whole concept.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JD2bhDl2ivc

The narrator basically says Thidell invented "True Temperament," but I'm sure (I hope) he actually meant the name of the fretboard configuration.

[Tensei]

Pure tone guitar

This is..amazing, it sounds absolutely stunning. I couldn't have imagined how much more guitars could still evolve but this definitely holds promise for the future. Too bad my own guitar sounds like crap after hearing this :P

[xRisingForce]

Anyway, if the strings are longer (as I assume they would need to be to have more frets), then they'd have to be thinner to get the same fundamental pitch, right? And wouldn't they have to be tuned more tightly, else you'd end up with... well, slack strings that don't vibrate properly to produce a sound.

I don't think so- that's why you can have differently gauged strings on a guitar (like a set of 0.8s or 0.13s). And I think tension is directly related to pitch regarding any string instrument, so an open tuning would have essentially the same tension. That's why it's harder to bend 0.13s as opposed to 0.8s lol, because the gauge is thicker but the tension is the same.


I think this might be a bit too esoteric for people scrolling through here (compare to bluefox-threads). I mean I'm a guitar player and you have me bored for god's sake. I can't imagine any non-guitar players around here would even know what you're talking about.

Also, your pic is broken.
Probably. Thanks for the suggestion.

I just wanted to share my observations to discuss.


http://www.dreams2.com/nbcm/gitarren/movie.htm

A guitar with 31 notes per octave.
Pure tone tuning.


I remember Anders Thidell introducing his own guitar concept (http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=1026230) on some Swedish talk show called Eftersnack ("Aftertalk"). The guitar shown there can be picked up and played as a normal guitar, and has 21 frets.

OK, this probably better demonstrates the whole concept.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JD2bhDl2ivc

The narrator basically says Thidell invented "True Temperament," but I'm sure (I hope) he actually meant the name of the fretboard configuration.

Wow, that's extremely cool how the fretwire is bent for every string.