Deja Igliashon
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//What was your path to discovering alternate tunings?// I am not a trained musician by any stretch of the imagination; I consider myself just a simple self-taught guitar player with slight proficiency on a few other instruments (and pretty solid skills on the drum set). Anything I know about music theory comes from either picking the brains of my classically-trained compadres or digging through wiki articles. My background is primarily rock music, mostly early '90s alternative and contemporary progressive metal; also, I listen to a lot of early synth-pop and dance music, and dabble a bit in most other genres. Not the kind of background one would expect of a microtonalist. I know a lot of microtonalists who entered the field via a quest for more "in tune" intervals. This is not at all how I came upon alternate divisions of the octave. In high school, I became obsessed with the idea of making music that was truly "new", something that was not just another iteration of a tired old formula. First I sought novelty in eccentric compound meters; but after discovering the world of progressive metal, I realized I wasn't on to anything really "new" (at least, not novel enough to satisfy me). I became fatalistic; "there are only 12 notes in the octave, so there are only so many chord progressions, so many melodies...after enough permutations, the possibilities will be extinct, unless music becomes less repetitive and more linear; but even then, music will still sound pretty much the same." Gazing glumly at my guitar fretboard one night, despairing over the 12-note limit, I suddenly had an epiphany: what if there were //more// than 12 notes? It was a real face-slapper, to tell the truth. My first thought was 13 notes per octave: what would that do to music? What would my guitar sound like if it had 13 frets in an octave? My intuition told me it'd probably be pretty horrible. But then I thought, what about 14 notes? Or 15? Heck, why not 20? I knew 24 would be the quartertone scale, and I'd heard some music written with quartertones and not found it all that stimulating. But the possibility of these other numbers intrigued me. Unfortunately, at this point in my history, I didn't yet know the terms "microtonal" or "xenharmonic" or "just intonation" or even "equal temperament", and Google hadn't yet taken off. So my epiphany failed to catch fire and was shelved while I whiled away the time seeking novelty in 12-tone Equal Temperament. Years later, I remembered my old idea of having more than 12 notes, and after a few clunky Google searches of things like "more than 12 notes per octave", I came upon the word "microtonal". This word was like a magic key to me: it unlocked a whole new world. The internet divulged to me the secret microtonal community that had long been growing along its underbelly, and there I found advice, mentorship, and a lot of infighting. The music of Harry Partch, Jon Catler, and Neil Haverstick were the first to catch my fancy; much more followed. After a brief period of studying Just intonation theory, I became convinced the equal temperaments were really what I was after. Not long after, I paid a local luthier an exorbitant price to sloppily and inaccurately refret one of my guitars to 31-EDO, and from then on I've been accumulating microtonal guitars (in 22-EDO, 13-limit JI, 15-EDO, and soon 17-EDO) and searching obsessively for new patterns, new tonalities, new melodic shapes, new ideas that //sound good// (or at least intriguing), and fantasizing about expanding musical consciousness to embrace microtonality. //What are your current/past/future particular interests?// Applying pop and rock sensibilities to alternative equal divisions of the octave; in the future I hope to start a xenharmonic prog-rock band, and/or team up with a good singer and make some microtonal electronic dance-pop. //What instruments or means have you had/do you have now/do you want for the making of microtonal music?// The aforementioned guitars, Native Instruments FM7, a few freeware softsynths. In the future: more guitars, more synths, maybe an electric bass in whichever EDO turns out to be my favorite. //Any good microtonal anecdotes?// Any of the times that a fellow guitar player first lays eyes on my 22-EDO Stratocaster...the look on their faces is PRICELESS! The best though was my friend Jen, who rather than shock and disgust reacted with amazement, and immediately demanded that I let her play it. She was instantly in love.
Original HTML content:
<html><head><title>IgliashonJones</title></head><body><em>What was your path to discovering alternate tunings?</em><br /> <br /> I am not a trained musician by any stretch of the imagination; I consider myself just a simple self-taught guitar player with slight proficiency on a few other instruments (and pretty solid skills on the drum set). Anything I know about music theory comes from either picking the brains of my classically-trained compadres or digging through wiki articles. My background is primarily rock music, mostly early '90s alternative and contemporary progressive metal; also, I listen to a lot of early synth-pop and dance music, and dabble a bit in most other genres. Not the kind of background one would expect of a microtonalist.<br /> <br /> I know a lot of microtonalists who entered the field via a quest for more "in tune" intervals. This is not at all how I came upon alternate divisions of the octave. In high school, I became obsessed with the idea of making music that was truly "new", something that was not just another iteration of a tired old formula. First I sought novelty in eccentric compound meters; but after discovering the world of progressive metal, I realized I wasn't on to anything really "new" (at least, not novel enough to satisfy me). I became fatalistic; "there are only 12 notes in the octave, so there are only so many chord progressions, so many melodies...after enough permutations, the possibilities will be extinct, unless music becomes less repetitive and more linear; but even then, music will still sound pretty much the same." Gazing glumly at my guitar fretboard one night, despairing over the 12-note limit, I suddenly had an epiphany: what if there were <em>more</em> than 12 notes? It was a real face-slapper, to tell the truth. My first thought was 13 notes per octave: what would that do to music? What would my guitar sound like if it had 13 frets in an octave? My intuition told me it'd probably be pretty horrible. But then I thought, what about 14 notes? Or 15? Heck, why not 20? I knew 24 would be the quartertone scale, and I'd heard some music written with quartertones and not found it all that stimulating. But the possibility of these other numbers intrigued me. Unfortunately, at this point in my history, I didn't yet know the terms "microtonal" or "xenharmonic" or "just intonation" or even "equal temperament", and Google hadn't yet taken off. So my epiphany failed to catch fire and was shelved while I whiled away the time seeking novelty in 12-tone Equal Temperament.<br /> <br /> Years later, I remembered my old idea of having more than 12 notes, and after a few clunky Google searches of things like "more than 12 notes per octave", I came upon the word "microtonal". This word was like a magic key to me: it unlocked a whole new world. The internet divulged to me the secret microtonal community that had long been growing along its underbelly, and there I found advice, mentorship, and a lot of infighting. The music of Harry Partch, Jon Catler, and Neil Haverstick were the first to catch my fancy; much more followed. After a brief period of studying Just intonation theory, I became convinced the equal temperaments were really what I was after. Not long after, I paid a local luthier an exorbitant price to sloppily and inaccurately refret one of my guitars to 31-EDO, and from then on I've been accumulating microtonal guitars (in 22-EDO, 13-limit JI, 15-EDO, and soon 17-EDO) and searching obsessively for new patterns, new tonalities, new melodic shapes, new ideas that <em>sound good</em> (or at least intriguing), and fantasizing about expanding musical consciousness to embrace microtonality.<br /> <br /> <em>What are your current/past/future particular interests?</em><br /> <br /> Applying pop and rock sensibilities to alternative equal divisions of the octave; in the future I hope to start a xenharmonic prog-rock band, and/or team up with a good singer and make some microtonal electronic dance-pop.<br /> <br /> <em>What instruments or means have you had/do you have now/do you want for the making of microtonal music?</em><br /> <br /> The aforementioned guitars, Native Instruments FM7, a few freeware softsynths. In the future: more guitars, more synths, maybe an electric bass in whichever EDO turns out to be my favorite.<br /> <br /> <em>Any good microtonal anecdotes?</em><br /> <br /> Any of the times that a fellow guitar player first lays eyes on my 22-EDO Stratocaster...the look on their faces is PRICELESS! The best though was my friend Jen, who rather than shock and disgust reacted with amazement, and immediately demanded that I let her play it. She was instantly in love.</body></html>