Classical Convert

Losing Ones Temper(ament)

There’s a fascinating article over at Ask A Luthier on why guitarists with a good ear are constantly retuning their feisty little beast of an instrument. It’s all down to temperament, if you didn’t guess from the rather stunning pun of the title.

The problem is because of the fixed frets on a guitar. What I had not previously appreciated was that when (good) non-fretted musicians play their non-fretted violins or violas or cellos, they are constantly readjusting their “tuning” because they can deftly plonk down their fingers anywhere they like. That is to say, on an unfretted instrument you can press down a string to make it any length you desire, so that you can play any note — as long as it is within the physical limits of the string. On a guitar, when you push down a string it is shortened to the length of the next fret because the fret is higher than the board you are pushing against. Therefore you can only play the set of notes determined by the positions of the frets.

It turns out that guitar frets are arranged so that the guitar is in equal temperament. Equal temperament means that most notes are slightly adjusted from their mathematically “perfect” frequencies so that every musical key sounds pretty good when played on the instrument (if you try and make one key mathematically perfect — which is called just intonation — you find that the other keys don’t work). This means that it is impossible to tune a guitar to “just intonation”, and a guitarist with a good ear who tries to correct the tuning into just intonation will be prevented by the spacings of the frets.

However, there is a way around this. You can use a just intonation fingerboard. This means that instead of having frets which go straight across the neck, they are all over the place, like in the picture below (taken from Microtonal Guitar):

My favorite comment on the reddit thread where I originally found this article is this recollection:

Ha, reminds me of this guy in my music class last year. I’d say, ‘Julian, go get us an E’. He’d run next door, play an E on the piano, and hum the note as he walked back into the practice room. We’d tune to his voice.