Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered about that kink between the G and B string, a major 3rd gap, when all the other strings are spaced perfect fourth. It bothers me because it's an anomaly that breaks the symmetry and increases the number of shapes to keep in mind.

The whole thread is an enjoyable read, and the answer seems to be - like many things in Western music theory - it was a design decision, a kind of legacy code, with pros and cons. "Things evolve to meet a need."

One of the answers talked about an all-fourths tuning, that some instruments use such tunings as standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_fourths_tuning

Theoretically it's more beautiful, and simplifies the shapes and their movements across the fretboard. It might be a pain to overcome years of learning patterns on the guitar with the kink - I'll have to try it. Sometimes it's good to shake up the foundation and see what new patterns emerge.

Similarly, I love the logic (and I'd say even wisdom) of the piano keyboard - but there are some kinks in there too, which introduce complexity in the patterns and their transformations, making them harder to remember. I'm curious to try a hexagonal keyboard and other alternative layouts - I imagine the symmetry has practical advantages, and to my mind more aesthetically pleasing.

Wicki–Hayden note layout - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicki%E2%80%93Hayden_note_layo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard

" I've always wondered about that kink between the G and B string, a major 3rd gap, when all the other strings are spaced perfect fourth. It bothers me because it's an anomaly that breaks the symmetry and increases the number of shapes to keep in mind."

One of the deeply beautiful things about the guitar is this "ugly" asymmetry. People with analytical minds that desire order always get bothered by this 3rd, why not go to all 4ths and be more elegant???

Because art and music arent always about being elegant! Tuning a guitar in all 4ths lets you play like a snooty stuck up jazz musician, but ultimately there are so many richer bar chords available with that 3rd in there that who cares if it is "ugly" to have the 3rd. People forget a plain jane normal guitar chord like a G chord or something is tonally actually very complex. It isn't like a basic g chord on a piano G B D. The "basic" G chord on guitar spans many octaves and has a non-obvious combination of notes. The 3rd in there for guitar tuning allows you to explore all those complexities with the given limitations of the human hand best.

> Tuning a guitar in all 4ths lets you play like a snooty stuck up jazz musician

I'd love to play like Stanley Jordan, who famously uses EADGCF.

Do it! Keep a spare guitar around with just that tuning! Even allowing for inflation, nice guitars are still incredibly cheap by historical standards. If you want an acoustic,I don't think you can go wrong with any guitar on this first page:

https://www.sweetwater.com/c600--6_string_Acoustic_Guitars?a...

I'm less enthusiastic about the low-cost electrics; probably want to go at least $200 and maybe something from guitarfetish.com instead.

Lots of people have their favorite cheap electric guitar, but mine is definitely the Tagima TW-55 (not the woodstock series, has to be TW). Can often find it used for ~$180

Someone (Larry Carlton? Not sure) said, Stanley Jordan is two of the most mediocre guitarists

But we love him anyway, of course

I use an all-fourths tuning on the Linnstrument and absolutely love it. As a person who approached both music theory and learning to play with their hands for the first time (after clicking around in a piano roll for years) with an all-fourths isomorphic keyboard, it removed whole categories of mental gymnastics and time sucks and let me pick up big chords and bits of jazz/rnb much quicker as a result. The benefits of being able to transpose and dance around the keyboard effortlessly without having to account for that major 3rd gap can't be overstated. You've got one unified mental model for everything and can skip directly to the good stuff. There are a number of grid instruments on the market that implement all fourths (Push, Launchpad, etc etc). If you have an iPad, Musix Pro can also act as a MIDI output (either for iPadOS instruments or for external hardware) that gives you an equivalent layout, but also many other interesting layouts that may work better for the music you want to play.

As a side note, after learning linnstrument, I picked up an 8 string guitar and found it much easier to translate my knowledge by tuning in all-fourths. With all-fourths, you really can learn chords as a set of (essentially) 2D glyphs that interact and fit together like Lego pieces. Inversions are easier to remember, transposition is always effortless, training your hands is quicker. Highly recommended.

How do you find what you're looking for in the grid of notes on a Linnstrument? I've been looking at MPE controllers and I (currently) want a Seaboard because I feel like the note positioning knowledge will transfer from keyboard.

Hi, sorry for the late reply but hopefully you'll see this: Linnstrument lights the keyboard up so that you see where C is at for each octave. It also lights up notes similar to a piano's black/white keys. It took a little while to get situated, but I got used to this. Note that each row of a Linnstrument is like a flattened piano roll. This page might be helpful: https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/support/support-linnstrument...

Additionally, Linnstrument, like all other grid instruments that implement all-fourths or a closely-related layout, has redundancy of notes on the board. That is to say, the same note often appears at least a couple times on the board. There's a setting (default on older firmware, easy to activate on newer firmware) where you can tell the board to light up ALL other redundant individuals of a note that's currently being played. For example, when I play C3, I will see C3 lit up all over the board simultaneously. This has a huge training wheel effect both in letting you witness the shape of your tetris-tile chords elsewhere on the board, but also, always gives you a sense of the geography of the board -- where you can jump to next if you want to dance your way up/down or to another chord or note.

The instrumental (ha HA) utility of the "kink" seems to me a natural consequence of compounding constraints:

some musing:

the number of strings is constrained to allow for chord voicing across all the strings,

and to provide range,

open chords with minimal fingering complexity radically increase accessibility,

duplication is critical to support those,

capping with the double octave of the lowest note makes up-and-down strumming work,

if you're going to break pattern to coerce the highest string, it's extremely useful to also provide its dominant (5th) which makes sounding those top strings together just "work" (especially: with a bass note on the lowest string), with the side benefit that it allows learned scale patterns to work across those two strings, where most melodic playing will be up-an-down and third- fourth- or fifth- jumping or stopping,

...add all this up and it's a collection of mild but clear wins that together really strongly entail the current system.

Robert Fripp's 500 page book on guitar playing no doubt explains why this is Wrong and his preferred all-fourths tuning etc. are Better though. :)

It's been interesting to learn about the reasoning (or post-facto explanations) of that seemingly anomalous major 3rd gap. I can see its advantages, like it enables certain barre chords.

Apparently, the tuning invented by Robert Fripp is called "New standard tuning", based on all fifths. I like the audacity to call it a new standard. :)

> C2-G2-D3-A3-E4-G4 (from lowest to highest)

> the five lowest open strings are each tuned to an interval of a perfect fifth

> the two highest strings are a minor third apart

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_standard_tuning

Yeah, perfect 5ths, or the weird in-between which would be tritone tuning allow for really wide intervalic leaps really ergonomically. Since a lot of progressive music favors melodic lines with wide intervalic leaps, it's a good option for that style.

> Sometimes it's good to shake up the foundation and see what new patterns emerge.

In this vein, I'm a lifelong guitarist and someone lent me a mandolin... I've learned a lot from playing it! It's tuned to straight fifths, but since it's much smaller than a guitar, you can actually reach all the notes of the scale without moving your hand up and down the neck. (I assume this wouldn't be true of a full-sized guitar tuned to fifths, although I haven't actually tried it.)

You can pretty quickly intuit how things work, and it will give you new insights into theory. The scales show up more simply and symmetrically than on a guitar. (e.g. the western major scale in the open position is 0-2-4-5, 0-2-4-5, 0-2-3-5, 0-2-3-5)

Has anyone tried to approach music theory without any historical underpinnings (and preferably ignorant of it). I'm thinking of something that started with cog sci and signal processing, and maybe ML. Don't bother linking the obligatory xkcd. I know it is the height of hubris to think that approach would produce anything like quality music for decades, but I think it might give insight to things that were left over from technical limitations or random chance. How far down the rabbit hole have experimental composers gone in questioning everything down to the foundation, and then kept digging?

The problem with creating a new music theory is the question what do you want the music theory to do? The main value of classical music theory is exactly the historical underpinnings that you want to drop

Music theory is just a labeling of the grouping of sounds that sound a certain way, right? And the reasons why they do.

Like you could combine a bunch of random notes together and it would sound terrible. THe reason why a certain scale is a scale is that it all jives together in a way that makes sense to the human brain.

Music theory is an approximation of what the aggregate human preference function for music is, where the aggregate is over a region and time. It's not really a theory per se, but you could definite "learn" many aspects of theory from enough labelled examples. Given many western music examples, you would easily learn circle of fifths and other common details; given indian music, you would learn microtones and other subtle touches that make indian music have depth.

And I would take it one step further... What do you want to do with music? The people I know who studied theory were interested in becoming better musicians.

I'm a jazz musician. The people I know who can create their own compositions and arrangements in that genre all studied theory in college.

Yah, music theory is an instrument of conservatism.

Most people just make what sounds good to them and that creates a massive power potential to extract by labelling some of that "good" and some of that "bad" in the eyes of an arbitrary system.

Not exactly what you're saying, but made me think of a time when once, in a guitar shop, the clerk was playing really cool sounds on the guitar. She was playing in Hawaiian Slack-Key tuning [0]. She said Europeans had left behind guitars after "discovering" the islands. The natives then developed their own way of tuning and playing them, outside of the European styles. Here's a random link to a song in the style I'm talking about [1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack-key_guitar

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbqEffI9LQs

Although a different tuning, it still uses equal temperament. I mean, it can be played on a guitar using standard tuning, but will require different positions.

Sounds vaguely reminiscent of Zeppelin's Bron Yr Aur (tuned CACGCE, iirc).

The low C drones are so entrancing!

FL Studio/Fruity Loops was created by gol who had no music theory knowledge and was a game programmer(only) before starting on Fruity Loops...

No need to wonder. You can consider how different musical scales appeared around the world: arab, indian, different temperaments... A nice video I watched about evolution of the guitar says a bit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjK4GVR1EcE and also how we tune modern instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK2jYk37Rlg

There is plenty of music theory not based on traditional western music.

The "atom" of all music is that frequencies with simple relationships (for example, exactly 1/3x) sounds "nice" (we can hear the harmony) and frequencies with complicated relationships (pi x) sounds sour (used intentionaly with great effect by bands like Sonic Youth for example).

The essence of western music is the decision to split the octave into 12 and have this be the notes we use (anyone who have tried this will discover that we run into trouble when our instument tonal range spans more than one octave, this is where "tunings" come in).

But there are alternatives: Spliting the octave into 53 parts has way more harmonies

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/53_equal_temperament

This is partialy used in turkish music for example.

The split into 12 is not just in western music. 12 appears in the 22 shruti system in Indian music due to not all 22 tones being used; the 22 can be seen as alterations in a 12 framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shruti_(music)#/media/File:Shr...

There is something "special" about 12 note chromaticism with 7 note diatonic scales.

I don’t think you can really throw music theory out because so much of it is inate to humans hearing and culture, and it’s largely a formalization of such.

However, the rub is that what most people consider music theory is western classical theory. There’s a lot of different music theories around the world , with different scales, structures etc…

Here’s a video you might find interesting of a microtonal guitar https://youtu.be/OVZShd7GZAY

Also a really good video on why “music theory” is often largely paired to western music https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA while there’s so many alternates out there

Some western instruments are easier to produce microtones on than others - violin/viola/cello/bass for example (or in a more rock/jazz idiom fretless electric bass).

Bohlen-Pierce https://theguardian.com/music/2010/mar/14/bohlen-pierce-bost...

I find this to be backwards.

Music doesnt derive from music theory. Instead music theory develops to understand and examine music that already exists. A huge error that a lot of music theory hobbyists make is to overuse it or use it in contexts where it doesn’t make sense (e.g., using theory developed to understand Mahler to understand EDM).

As much as we like to imagine that music derives purely from the mathematical relationship between tones and that aliens would produce the same music we would based on universal physical principles, that’s not the case.

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