While I am strongly wed to the Western music tradition, I must confess that I found the enclosed (microtonal) song to be catchy, and his analogy about music being a three-story building is awesome, in my mind:
Sounds pretty good to me. Not something I expected to see/hear on this forum at all. Do we know what tuning/temperament it is in? That’s what really bugs me about this area, is it seems to be a kind of unspoken secret sauce.
Note that even in Western music it is not that simple. Pianists have a long history of using unequal temperaments. I was asking around on the Piano World forum a while ago and some piano tuners still tune this way – sometimes without their clients knowing, or understanding why the piano sounds “better”. There’s some nice videos on this, e.g.:
Bradley Lehman’s analysis of Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier” heavily inspired the “Thidell Formula 1” temperament (though they removed that from their website).
There’s some videos on Frusciante and EVH lowering the B string to get pure major thirds.
The lute (guitar predecessor) has a long history of using meantone. Brandon Acker has some nice videos (if the frets look a little off it’s probably 1/6 syntonic meantone, if they look way off it’s probably 1/4 syntonic meantone).
As I understand it, brass instruments are generally tuned to pure intonation, wind are (or used to be) tuned to meantone, and strings still tend towards pure intonation (when not performing with a piano). But this is an area I still need to research.
And that’s not even getting to non-western stuff. Quarter tones can sound good too. This guy covers a lot of ground:
I’m personally partial to Michael Harrison who uses pure intonation and often uses the 7/4 “harmonic 7th”. You don’t generally hear it as despite being the most significant overtone/harmonic after the major 5th and major 3rd, it’s 300 cents below a regular flat seventh.
Sounds cool, I think @Brendan likes hip-hop. There is also a discussion about the artist Sevish on the forum that you may wish to check out.
1 Like
If you’re interested in microtonal guitar music, I know a couple of folks you can look into.
First is King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - they have an album of microtonal guitar music called Flying Microtonal Banana which is very good.
Then there’s Tolgahan Çoğulu, who plays Turkish makkam music on a guitar with movable extra frets. Hell, he even has a guitar with a LEGO fretboard to allow him to change the microtonal intervals he’s playing easily.
Indian classical music drips with microtonal raagas. To me it’s very much like blues of a certain kind.
2 Likes
I was waiting for someone to name-drop McLaughlin here lol! I know very little of microtonal music but he’s literally the only name that comes to my mind when I hear the topic.
1 Like
Indian music is ladened with microtonal scales, it’s usually hitting a target note but you come at it from below or above, sometimes even with microtonal scale sequences that ascend/descend within an interval. Adds a lot of depth and emotion, Indian music being mostly melodic, as opposed to western harmony, can get interesting very quickly.
edit: I don’t mean western harmony is uninteresting in any way, just that melodic systems with a lot of microtonal application can be sufficiently complex as well 
The Raaga’s are some of the most comprehensive scale systems ever devised. It’s possibly one of the oldest forms of music on the planet, but that’s another discussion altogether, I do believe strongly there have been thousands of civilizations like ours and even more advanced before ours, and a lot of Indian mythology ( including arts and science ) comes from civilizations we know nothing of today, whether some of those civilisations have been concealed from us or not is another very interesting topic to me 
1 Like
Did McLaughlin really do microtonal music? The guitar on the Lotus Feet album cover looks a lot like regular 12 tone equal temperament.
2 Likes
That clip was q’d to the killer violin solo. McLaughlin himself may not be playing much microtonal music, but he surrounded himself with Indian musicians, thats the reasoning I presume he’s often brought up with the subject.
Edit: besides you don’t need microtonal frets is you can bend, guitar, sitar, veena etc. It’s what you do with it that matters.
Yes, there’s the Frusciante example, and EVH. I also found a Middle Eastern example. It’s an interesting idea, I need to check the math and play around with it some more. You’re still working within a framework of ET which is going to give a certain sound.
Dr Ross Duffin recommends using 1/6 syntonic comma meantone as the base for some music. I need to play around with that too. It requires moving all the frets however.
AFAIK the Sitar has moveable frets and would normally be tuned to pure intonation, not ET, unless performing with other ET instruments.
1 Like
John M’s playing in Shakti has some bends which could be analyzed, however I think his ability to play within the various rhythmic cycles while improvising was his focus in terms of drawing from a traditional discipline. L Shankar’s violin playing is outstanding. Would be an incredible study to apply to electric guitar.
2 Likes