Kite Guitar Exercises and Techniques by Kite Giedraitis: Difference between revisions

[[Kite Guitar Exercises and Techniques|Exercises and techniques]] for the [[The Kite Guitar|Kite Guitar]] by [[Kite Giedraitis]], assumes the downmajor tuning. They are for a 6-string guitar, but can be adapted to a 7- or 8-string. Once you master them, there's no need to practice them further, because you'll naturally reinforce these skills in the course of singing and playing actual songs.

There are plenty of guitar exercises to make your fingers more agile or strong. They all apply to the Kite Guitar. These exercises help you navigate 41edo better.

The best way to internalize 41-edo is to sing 41-edo! Get in the habit of singing what you play and playing what you sing.

* Play and sing a chromatic melody (steps of one fret).

* Play and sing a zigzag chromatic melody: P1 vm2 P1 ^m2 P1 vM2 P1 ^M2  P1.

For all your favorite scales, play ascending and descending lines harmonized in 3rds. If the two notes lie on the same string, use the scale's innate fuzziness to move one of the notes a half-fret up or down. The fuzzy notes are bolded:

Upminor with a raised 7th at the end, a sort of "macro-fuzziness":

The harmonic and subharmonic pentatonic scales aren't fuzzy. They have a pleasing variety of intervals.

The fact that each 41-edo note only occurs on every other string makes certain scales awkward to play, for example scales with pythagorean or neutral 3rds. But for 5-limit or 7-limit scales of low odd-limit, it usually works out that you're forced to move to the next string just about when you would want to anyway. For example, the downmajor scale is P1 -- M2 - vM3 - P4 -- P5 - vM6 -- vM7 - P8. The double dashes indicate where you have to move up a string.

4) Put your 1st finger on any fret. Put your 4th finger 5 frets higher on the next string up. Play as an interval, this is a down-5th. Now bend the higher (4th finger) note up half a fret to make a good 3/2.  

* Continue cycling through the lowest 3 strings, 6th --> 5th --> 4th --> 6th, until you reach the 4th dot.

* Whenever you reach the 4th dot (or overshoot it by 1 fret), leap down as before.

Because 41 is a prime number, any one of 41edo's intervals will generate a similar circle (except the octave of course).   

When translating from 12-edo to 41-edo, one may need to move by a major 2nd in two equal or nearly equal root movements. For example, the 12-edo chords might be IV7 -- #IV7 -- V7 or VIm -- bVIm -- V. Assuming the roots translate to IV, V and vVI, the former will involve splitting a plain major 2nd and the latter, a downmajor 2nd.

To split a <u>plain</u> major 2nd, one moves by two frets then jumps to the final chord, e.g. IVv7 -- #IVv7 -- Vv7. Or one jumps to a root two frets from the final chord first, then moves two frets, as in IVv7 -- bVv7 -- Vv7. Either way, this jump is a plain minor 2nd = 3 edosteps. Jump up 1 string and back 5 frets = (+1,-5) in relative tab. Splitting an <u>upmajor</u> 2nd is even easier, since each of the two moves is a simple two-fret move.  

But splitting a <u>downmajor</u> 2nd is trickier. One must jump twice, and one of the jumps must backtrack by 8 frets. If one jump is (+1,-5), the other must be (-1,+8). If descending, they must be (-1,+5) and (+1,-8). This is not very intuitive, and it's worthwhile to practice rapidly executing these two jumps. Since the jumps can come in either order, practice both routes. Start with playing single notes, then play entire chords on each root.

Moving exclusively by plain minor 2nds and upminor 2nds aka aug unisons = (0,+2) can imitate the sound of 12-edo quite closely. The exact order of the steps doesn't matter very much, just do whatever is comfortable. Try traversing these intervals:

Try to get a steady rhythm going. Keep going up fret by fret until you run out of room, then move down fret by fret. A complimentary exercise starts at Eb on the 4th dot, leaps down to Ab and back up. Then go up one fret and continue.

The next use of quarter-fret bends is less essential. One can hide pitch shifts by sharpening an entire chord by some fraction of an edostep. Obviously it won't work if a chord uses open strings. Play a progression with a pitch shift, e.g. Iv - vVI^m - vII^m - Vv7 - Iv. The 3rd chord has vD and the 4th chord has D. Bend the entire 3rd chord up a quarter-fret by ear, so that its vD becomes a half-down D. This creates another pitch shift, because the chord now has a half-down A which differs from the previous chord's vA. However, two small 15¢ shifts are better than one large 30¢ one. Alternatively, bend the 2nd chord up a '''sixth-fret''' and the 3rd chord up a '''third-fret''', to create three pitch shifts of 10¢ each.

In 41-edo, 5-over intervals like 5/4 and 5/3 are about 6¢ flat. This issue is even more subtle than the innate-comma pentad, but still noticeable. One can correct this by applying a '''tenth-fret''' bend to certain notes of the chord. This sounds hard, but fortunately there are only a few chord shapes to apply this to. One quickly gets in the habit of "leaning on" certain notes in these shapes.  

For example, in a downmajor chord in R-5-3 voicing, bend the 3rd up slightly with your pinkie. Listen closely for interference beats that slow down as you bend up. It may help to play the actual coinciding harmonics first. If your chord is 4 x 3 x 5, play matching harmonics at 11 x x x 26, and also at  x x 10 x 17. Except for the last one at fret 17, touch the string just behind the fret. IOW fret 11 is really fret 10.5. For a 4 x 3 5 5 voicing, to bend the 3rd up, you'll need to pull your pinkie down towards the treble side of the fretboard. For a 1st inversion x 4 3 5 x voicing, push your finger up towards the bass side. It's rather difficult to bend the 3rd in a close 4 4 3 5 voicing.  

Whereas primes 5 and 7 are tuned slightly flat in 41edo (5.8¢ and 3.0¢ respectively), primes 11 and 13 are slightly sharp (4.8¢ and 8.3¢ respectively). Thus ratios that have either 5 or 7 on one side and either 11 or 13 on the other are doubly mistuned. Bending up to ratios using 11 or 13 lets us fine-tune them. When primes 5 or 7 are present, best to underbend a bit, to match their flatness. This also makes primes 11 and 13 more accessible. For 13/8, the ^m6 is much easier to reach than the ~6. 11/6, 11/9 and 13/12 also become easier.  

!41-edo name

Harmonics are written as <12> for the 12th-fret harmonic. The 2nd harmonic falls midway between the 20th and 21st frets, and is written as <20.5>. Here are all the places harmonics occur, excluding those above the 41st fret. Be sure to pluck on an [[wikipedia:Node_(physics)|anti-node]].  

! rowspan="4" |fret

These are not playing exercises for your fingers, but musical exercises for your mind.  

Not a very nice voicing. You can only take rotations so far. The basic rules of voicing and voice leading still hold. Good chord voicings imitate the harmonic series: larger intervals between the lower voices and smaller intervals between the upper voices. In accompaniments, Good bass melodies tend to have big leaps, and good melodies in the upper voices tend to have smaller steps. So a good voicing will often rotate to a bad one, and you'll often want to revoice after rotating.  

All these rotations work in 12-edo, or any tuning system, but unless your guitar is isomorphic, the fretboard shapes won't simply rotate.

Like the previous exercise, this creates a new melody or chord progression from an old one. You simply swap up for down, so that upminor becomes downminor, etc. Swap intervals, not notes. The quality (major, minor, perfect, augmented or diminished) is unchanged. Plain intervals are unchanged. Mid intervals are unchanged, because they are simultaneously both double-up minor and double-down major. But the former would become double-downminor, and the latter double-up major.  

This swapping has the effect of interchanging 5-limit with 7-limit-no-fives, and harmonic with subharmonic. Rotations also exchange harmonic with subharmonic, so rotating followed by switching preserves this property.

! colspan="2" |rotated

! colspan="2" |swapped

This is analogous to 12-equal's Cdim7 --> B7 --> E (or EM7 or Em7). The idea is to lower one of the 4 notes in the dim7 chord by a semitone to transform it into a dom7 chord, then use a typical V7 - I cadence. The following table uses a single dim7 chord that is spelled 4 different ways for convenience. This starting chord is one of the three possible dim7 chords in 12-equal, thus two more tables would be needed to show all possible modulations. The note that is lowered is '''<u>bolded</u>'''.  

In 41-equal, a dim7 chord is possible, but here we will focus on the ^dim7 and vdim7 chords. Neither of these are symmetrical, so 40 more tables would be needed! How much to raise/lower by? The bolded note has another chord note a tritone above it. The bolded note is either lowered to make that interval a perfect 5th, or raised to make a perfect 4th.  

Sometimes another note in the chord needs to shift by one edostep to make a low-odd-limit chord. When this happens, the shifting note is bolded in the "new chord" column. Without this shift, the new chord is more dissonant. But the down add-7 chord is a very familiar dissonance. Furthermore the vanishing [[225/224|Ruyoyo comma]] means the 45/32 downaug 4th is really a consonant 7/5 dim 5th. So it's listed in the 2nd row as an alternative to shifting. The upminor add6 chord is included as a possibility because it's a rotation of v,7, and has the same vanishing innate comma. But the other two non-shifting chords, F# minor add-down6 and D add-up7, are less plausible because of their dissonant plain 3rds.