TRein wrote:
Eric Reid wrote:
...In theory, this sort of fret work could sweeten up the most common chords in a few keys, while making everything else much worse than it already is...
That is true with some other temperaments like mean tone but the guitar shown in the video appears to be equal tempered. Lutenists have been messing about with mean tone and it works well provided you stay in certain keys. Equal temperament yields intrinsically sharp thirds and flat fifths and mean tone tries to address that. Equal temperament on guitar is made worse by the different sizes, weights and tensions of individual strings. The staggered frets shown in the video and compensating the bridge
and the nut do the same thing. Dude in the video is playing a guitar with a locking nut so the only way to simulate compensating the nut is to stagger the frets. Think about what happens as you make the string shorter or longer by removing material from the nut end of the fretboard and scooping the nut back from the end of the fretboard to lengthen the distance from the nut to the first. Basically you are sliding an equal tempered scale back and forth to account for the inaccuracies inherent in each string.
All that being said I think Dude could have done a much better job showcasing the invention with a cleaner setting on his amp or using an acoustic guitar.
No, Anders Thidell does some hand waving about this, but "True Temperament" is not the same as equal temperament. From the True Temperament website:
"Cromatic offsets in cents from equal temperament as follows:
E -2, F 0, F” -4, G +4, G” -4, A 0, Bb -4, B -1, C +2, C”-4, D +2, Eb -4."
There's no reason that a locking nut can't be compensated. Even the benefits of individual string compensation at the nut become negligibly small if a guitar is properly set up. If you want to chase down the final crumbs of intonation errors, you'll have to put away the electric tuner, and learn to hear intervals. The fundamental frequency of a string does not equal its perceived pitch in most musical contexts. That's why piano tuners use their ears.
