Microtonal Guitar

 C Nature’s Scale The next logical progression in our journey to understand understand the underlying theory of microtonal guitars is creating a tuning system.  A tuning system is the way you notes or pitches on the instruments that you are playing are constructed. First we will create a tuning system using the 5 limit major…

Microtones are any notes that fall in between the current pitches of fixed pitch instruments such as the piano. These instruments are based on the current musical practice of “12 tone Equal Temperament”.  While this is a very broad way of looking at it, this is what I believe, the way most people think of…

Just Intonation Defined Just intonation  is the tuning of musical intervals as whole number ratios (such as 3:2 or 4:3) of frequencies. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. Just intervals (and chords created by combining them) consist of members of a single harmonic series of a (lower) implied fundamental. While the below is common explanations of these terms I’m paraphrasing (or in a…

The primary focus of this site is to help guitar players who are interested in the world of microtonal music and more specifically microtonal guitar understand the basic underlying theory of tuning systems and microtonality and how it applies to the range of options of microtonal guitar’s on the market. I am creating a video…

5 Limit C Minor Diatonic Scale Let’s now create a tuning system for a combined scale using the 5 limit minor scale for the 1, 4, and 5 chords to create the ratio’s for all the intervals we will need. Below is the 5 limit diatonic minor scale below: Musical Ratio Musical Interval Note Hz…

5 Limit C Major Diatonic Scale The next logical progression in our journey to understand understand the underlying theory of microtonal guitars is creating a tuning system.  A tuning system is the way you notes or pitches on the instruments that you are playing are constructed. First we will create a tuning system using the…

The next step as we continue our journey towards understanding the world of Microtonal music and Microtonal Guitar is understanding how musical scales are generated using the musical ratios derived from the harmonic series. One important concept to clarify before we proceed is the prime numbers and prime limits. A prime number is a number…

The Monchord A monochord consists of a single string stretched over a sound box, with the strings held taut by pegs or weights on either end. It was used earlier by others, but most of our current knowledge of the instrument is of its use by Pythagoras as early around the 6th century BC for…

The Western Musical alphabet consists of 12 notes, A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, and G#.  All notes labeled with #’s can also be express as flats of the note above it. For example A# can be referred to as Bb, D# as Eb etc. Notes that share the same…

In order to have a really good understanding of musical temperaments and microtonal guitar theory it is important that you have a very firm understanding of scales and how they relate to each other for any key that you are in.  Let’s look below at scales on the 1st position Major Scale starting on the…