Microtonal guitar resources

Lots of people like guitars. Lots of people get into microtones. Inexplicably, some people are in both of those categories, and now we have microtonal guitars. The ease with which guitars can be microtonalized is definitely to blame.

Microtonal frettings with more than 20-something frets per octave can be difficult to play. Those with fewer are usually either not very close to JI, or else are limited in modulation and/or voicing. An exception to this is the Kite Guitar (see also Kite Tuning), a guitar fretting that uses every other step of 41-edo, i.e. 41-ED4 or "20½-edo". The interval between two adjacent open strings is always an odd number of 41-edosteps. Thus each string only covers half of 41-edo, but the full edo can be found on every pair of adjacent strings. The Kite Tuning makes 41-edo about as playable as 19-edo or 22-edo, although there are certain trade-offs.

Go Fretless!

The most direct way to get microtones, which leaves the most up to your ears. Tried by many, pursued with a dogged obsession with intonation by fewer. Lots of resources out there -- you might start with http://www.unfretted.com/

Refretting

John Starrett FAQ on do-it-yourself fretting - http://infohost.nmt.edu/%7Ejstarret/guitar.html

Buzz Kimball on the same - http://www.nonoctave.com/heroes/buzz/retrofretting.html

Dante Rosati: Adventures in Just Intonation Guitar - http://danterosati.com/justguitar.html

Metatonal Music/Sword guitars - http://www.metatonalmusic.com/ - microtonal guitar conversions

Practice with refretted guitars:

How to tune a 19edo guitar by ear

Get a new neck!

John Carruthers - http://www.carruthersguitars.com/

Paul Guy - http://www.truetemperament.com/ - curved frets in "true" 12-tET, Bach/Lehman well-temperament, and meantone

Lukas Brunner produces a guitar with removable neck - http://www.brunner-guitars.com/

Ron Sword - http://www.MetatonalMusic.com - Strat and Ibanez necks

Jon Catler/Freenote guitars - http://www.freenotemusic.com/site/store/guitars.html replacement necks for 19-EDO, 31-EDO, fretless, or twelve-tone-plus.

Interchangeable Fretboards

Mark Rankin makes magnetic interchangeable fretboards: Mark Rankin [email protected] (remove spaces)

Sword Guitars Gallery

Adjustable Frets

A guitar with moveable frets that are split, and thus independent for each string, is perhaps ideal for a musical environment in which the musical scale varies from piece to piece. John Schneider calls his a "Well-Tempered Guitar." Wim Hoogewerf has one too.

Hervé Chouard produces guitars with adjustable frets: http://www.chouard.de/

For the "Adjustable Microtonal Guitar": http://www.tolgahancogulu.com http://www.myspace.com/adjmicrotonalguitar

Quick n Dirty

Main article: Moving the bridge hack

One tack: take a trashy guitar and move the bridge to a different spot. You'll get a (not necessarily close to equal) division of the octave with ~10-15 notes. Dan Stearns has done this, and so has David Finnamore, and more recently Jason Conklin!

Chris Vaisvil's cheap, quick and dirty temporary guitar frets - a great way to try new tunings.

Even quicker (and maybe less dirty): open tunings

An even simpler idea, without a modification of the guitar being necessary, are open tunings. See this thread on the Yahoo MakeMicroMusic list and

this article on the Yahoo tuning list for some possibilities. This is especially suitable for supersets of 12edo.

A concrete description of an open guitar tuning for 24edo can be found on muzicforums.com (also reachable from the above thread).

The Tritare

The Tritare, developed by folks in New Brunswick, Canada, seems to be fretted to a normal 12, but because it features 3-string groups the sound is FM-like and inescapably xenharmonic. Or is it? See this Science News article.