I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that.

I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rare trinary intersection. It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound. It's the same old Square and Saw waves with the same instruments we have had for hundreds of years. Sadly i think musicianship has all but died in Gen Z, quantization / pitch correction / take splicing / overuse of compression are rampant, and every popular artist is basically as fake as Milli Vanilli. Protools has raised a generation of lazy and uncreative musicians with awful rhythm. Get off my lawn! Ok i'm done.

> I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation

This is not possible with purely technological means. To "retune" and "adjust" even a single piece of music in a way that approaches just intervals you'd need an in-depth analysis of all meaningful dissonances, consonances, modulations, perhaps repetitions/imitations etc. etc. in the actual piece; and these are often not even evident from the actual notes because all music uses ornamentation at a variety of levels, hence lots of judgment calls are involved in the process. Where instruments are easy to retune in a flexible way (not really true of guitars, due to the use of physical frets) and the actual music allows for it, performers do use alternatives to equal temperament, such as a variety of "meantone" temperaments.

Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out.

[0] http://www.garygarrett.me/?page_id=1922 [1] https://youtu.be/jA1C9VFqJKo

Microtonal music really isn't hard to find. It's just not very popular, because it's too niche for mainstream listeners.

And most popular VSTs - Serum, Pigments, Massive, Phaseplant - all use wavetables and not 'the same old square and saw waves.'

Modern pop really isn't any more generic than 30s/40s jazz, 50s rock and roll and bubblegum, and so on. That's why it's called popular music and not experimental music.

Modern pop is more generic because the song you hear in the recording is not really played on real instruments or sang by a real person. The samples that were used to create it might have been, but they've been completed deconstructed and then reassembled in ProTools.

Even considering the stuff that Queen did for tracks like Bohemian Rhapsody where they used dozens of layered tracks isn't really the same thing. They used that layering to create a sound that wasn't possible, otherwise. But the tracks themselves were made from recording real people playing real instruments.

Modern pop, in comparison, is just about commoditization, slapping out a track at as little cost as possible. Everything gets lined up on a rigid beat grid, neutering any texture or feel in the song.

Rick Beato has a great video on what exactly is going on and why there actually is a significant difference with "post-ProTools" pop from previous years. https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc

There's a def "greatest hits" effect with jazz. I mean, how awesome is "Minnie the Moocher", etc.

There's also a "trailblazer" effect which is kind of weird because it doesn't happen in classical music. Namely that we listen a lot more to Miles Davis and Coltrane than the random swing band of their age. Heck, Miles gets more props than the sublime big band swing of Duke Ellington.

Honestly, out of all the things I've been paid for over the many years of my career, the one that gives the the most pleasure, thinking back, is being paid as an extra for The Blues Brothers.

Watching Cab Calloway do Minnie the Moocher in the 70s? Live? Paid for it? Priceless.

Working for Apple was awesome, as were the other places I've worked, but for sheer enjoyment per dollar, the Palladium in the 70s wins.

Blues, not metal or rock, is absolutely full of microtonal wails and chirps and wiggles and vibrato, and fret pressure very much gives way to a whole new way to think about the strings; not something to press down like a button at exactly perpendicular force to delicately or firmly contact the frets, but strings are something to be grabbed, ripped, whipped, twisted behind the frets. Add to that a hard attack can whiplash a string out of tune by another 10 cents, and we are talking about making this thing a voice, not some synthesized keyboard doodad. It's a human soul wailing. That's the blues.

Not rock? I guess we'd have to know your definition of "rock"... but if you allow "classic" or "progressive" rock into your view, then a lot of those players utilize every aspect of expression on the guitar.

And how about the whammy bar? Maybe guitarists aren't consciously using it to untemper their intervals, but to say "rock guitar" is locked to tempered tuning is incorrect.

Not metal?

Go listen to some of Dimebag Darrell’s solos. They sound ridiculously bad if played in whole semitones. Fair enough, he’s fairly bluesy. But other genres of metal give the distinction you give the left hand to the right too - variations in pick attack wildly change the sound.

I’m guessing it’s fair to suggest that similar things exist in all genres of music, and on all instruments.

You need to look into modern electronic instruments my friend. Micro tuning is a big thing. The way people play with timing and groove now is freer than ever due to the influence of hip hop on electronic music. The modern modular scene is way beyond just the old saw and square waves. Sure we keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum but there are a lot of interesting things out there.

> keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum

Yes, but almost nobody is dropping raw 808 kick samples onto their tracks. Even though it's a "traditional sound", usually artists do quite a bit of work to transform it. Kind of like what, you know, "real" composers do with "real" musical traditions.

Check Jacob Collier if you haven't already. He is really pushing it, he has a song where he changes the temperament during the song (sorry if this imprecise/wrong). He is kinda like a musical prodigy. Not my cup of tea but I do recognize he is very refreshing.

Jacob Collier has tricks like using how many cents out of tune certain chords are in equal temperament from just intonation to find a sequence of chords that modulate to a half-sharp key without it ever sounding out of tune:

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/jacob-colliers-four-magica...

That's just the beginning. He posts long breakdowns of his tracks on YouTube explaining everything he does in detail. He's not only a musical virtuoso, but he's incredibly adept at recording and Apple's Logic/tech in general, so he's able to blend those skills seamlessly.

With Jacob and others getting people interested in tunings and unusual harmony, there are now lots of people on YouTube creating music that exploits shifting tunings or alternate systems like 24TET, etc. So to the grandparent post, don't worry - there has never been a time when so many young people are playing with and exploiting tuning systems to create interesting music.

Nice article, thanks!

> It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound.

I don't know this to be true, I see people building weird musical instruments all the time. As for electronic sounds (it's not always digital) the modular community is absoultely teeming with expression. Here are some fun guys: https://youtu.be/AGN5N4vn5Bs

https://youtu.be/DKSr8CE7600

Yes, also: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx74vAHCehhLOeQNwbJcGyQ

Another upvote for modular synth. Andrew (https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/) has some amazingly cool devices.

Chaotic orbits for "waves", running audio through cmos gates to produce pitch changes, running ADSRs through a filter to produce more random envelopes,... and he seems to come up with new module ideas monthly if not more often.

My most favorite recent module of his is based on cellular automata.

https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/cellular-automata

> same old Square and Saw waves

You should explore more electronic music. This is either an intentional attack or an ignorant statement.

Edit:

> musicianship has all but died in Gen Z

See South Park S15E07 "You're Getting Old"

William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html

Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.

I'm not seeing any dead links there? That page has always been a listing of the mp3 files on the physical CD that comes with his book, only some of which were ever put online.

BTW, Sethares' research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares goes way beyond tuning music to simple ratios. His whole book is about working with a model of sounds being "in tune" with one another that doesn't just boil down to that.

A bunch of the examples lead to a 404. Also his research is really mind blowing stuff, I was in disbelief when I heard the first few examples.

"Three Ears" looks like the one most relevant to this discussion and is luckily still there.

What do you mean by “self adjusting just intonation”? Presumably you would need to sequence the desired key changes in your song, because I don’t think you’re going to want software to attempt that automatically. And it can get more complicated than that. I can imagine songs where you would want a melody note in one key to be sustained while the rest of the harmony transitions around it into a new key, which is also something that I can’t imagine being done automatically right now.

The Access Virus C I owned several years ago could automatically adjust major and minor thirds to be "perfect", but only when played as a chord. It made a big difference.

> Unless I'm playing a piano ...

Actually, the way a piano is tuned is pretty funky.

The rigidity of the strings means the higher 'harmonics' of a note get sharper and sharper. If you tune the fundamentals to exact equal temperament a piano sounds out of tune, because the upper partials of lower notes are pretty sharp versus the lower partials of higher notes.

Hence the frequences of the fundamentals are stretched out such as to get the inharmonic partials as in tune sounding as possible between different notes.

This is why you hire a piano tuner to tune your piano.

Pianos are weird.

The lowest notes, generally have one string that makes the note. The middle, have two strings (persumably to make it louder).

the high notes have 3 strings per note.

So sometimes playing one key is actually playing three tones.

Pictures from a violin/piano maintenance building school make it a little clearer: https://www.nbss.edu/full-time-programs/piano-technology/cur...

> This is why you hire a piano tuner to tune your piano.

Idk... I think it's more about the hassle. People I've known let their piano get really out of tune (like we are talking a quarter tone off for some tones "just avoid those"), to the point where their own amateurish tuning would be a big improvement, before they call the tuner over.

> This is why you hire a piano tuner to tune your piano.

I have an electric, but, yeah, point taken. And half the time I have it set as a harpsichord anyway.

I thought you were going to say you a violinist—that's the best example of perfect 4ths and 5ths that you can integrate with a band or orchestra that may include a normal 440 Hz A piano with equal temperament based on sqrt(2,12).

I am a violinist. :) That's my primary instrument. But even there you don't tune to perfects fifths all the time. In string quartets you tune the bottom C of the cello up a bit and the E's of the violins down a bit. But if you're playing with a piano in, say, a piano quintet, you generally play equal temperament with the piano.

But given the frets are placed to divide the length of the string in a specific place, you're aiming to play equal temperament, right? You're using that system on a typical guitar, even if the sounds don't match exactly.

Of course it's not going to be perfect, but it's still closer to 12TET-with-noise than some specific mediaeval tuning.

There are guitars with weirdly shaped frets, if you really want to approach true temperament.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-659a2269b3cf8608d61d56...

Yes and no. Those who play electric guitars with distortion prefer to approach Just Intonation(for a given key) as it doesn't have so much intermodulation.

There is an attempt to tune guitars close to equal temperament trademarked as True Temperament:

https://www.truetemperament.com/faq/

I for one am happy when my 12th and 24th frets are in tune. Solos sound off and weak if these two don't hold.

To use computing slang to talk about music: this is just ricing. At best you'll sound out of tune with the rest of the band, at worst you'll run into wolf intervals and other issues with just intonation.

This touches on the biggest reason we stick with 12-tone equal temparament in the West: social reasons. Having a standard means we can play together, in groups or at jams, without having to negotiate which tuning system we use (an argument most working musicians I've met see as utter wank and a waste of time).

Is ricing a computer term? Thought it was a (funny|racist) reference to JDM cars and how engrossing a hobby tweaking those cars can be.

Yea, it definitely has racist undertones related to import tuners. "Rice" implying "asian." I find it a bit uncomfortable to read people posting their customized Linux desktops, for example, and calling them "riced out."

I only ever heard this as a car culture term.

Maybe I'm showing my power level a bit here. To me it means "tweaking something's aesthetics in a way that doesn't improve, perhaps even degrades, performance".

I wouldn't say that you aim to play equal temperament. More that it's the base structure you deviate from. I think my real point is that on most instruments you don't play only twelve tones. You play a whole lot more that get grouped into twelve groups.

Sometimes the viola da gamba is set up with double frets to handle playing in multiple keys without retuning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VpxeGb3qZA

Interesting. I never had a problem with adjusting my pitch on the viol when I was playing that, even with single frets.