Tuned Out Of Tunings ..but I will tune back in though.

I thought I'd do a quick post on here. I did state in the last one - way back in November - that I was hopeful there'd be follow-up posts on the topic of tunings and the harmonic 7th. As ever though, things have gotten a little lost in the weeds. So I think this is a topic that will periodically reappear on here over the course of years rather than weeks, as my interest ebbs and flows.

I was looking at how I'd be able to construct a guitar with frets perfectly spaced for my perfect tunings, but I think that's a bit beyond my technical craft at the moment. Meaning it has to remain theoretical. I liked the idea of creating a guitar that would only work in one key. That wouldn't be very practical in general of course, but I really liked the imagined sweetness of perfectly tuned notes.

I actually bought a 16-string lyre harp as a next-best-thing. It's been fun to play with, but it's so hard to tune the strings to perfection. Leaving me with the sense that perfection really only exists in the mind's eye, and that with a real instrument it will always just be a case of 'near enough'. Tuning one of the strings to the 7/4 harmonic 7th does add an interesting twist though. The simple pleasantness of the seven notes of a standard key gains an added richness. It's hard to describe the difference (perhaps I should record some comparisons), but it feels a bit more mystical in tone. Like I'm opening some strange magic box in a Sinbad the Sailor movie. Maybe it's reminiscent of music/sounds I've heard in movies before. Then again, the lyre harp does sound very Legend of Zelda anyway, so it brings a bias. Again, it would probably be a truer test to experiment on a guitar, but as I remain constrained by standard tuning I don't quite have the option.

With software it's much easier to set the note frequency (though even here it's not so simple in reality). This got me thinking that perhaps it would be possible to have software that automatically tuned perfectly in accordance with the particular key you were playing in. A bit like Auto-Tune. So, let's say you're constructing a song using a MIDI piano. The notes you're playing are in the key of C. The software recognises this and automatically shifts the frequencies to how they would be if they were Just Tone tuned in C. This could be an in-built option in the software, that you could set to off or on - obviously, if you're playing something less simple the song might not all be in one key. Though even here, if there's a key change in the song the software could perhaps recognise this too, and shift the note frequencies accordingly within the track. It would be interesting to hear the difference. I'm sure with the growing sophistication of software and AI this will become possible. (Maybe there's software out there that already does this?)

I'd still much prefer to sit with a sweetly-tuned guitar though.