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Fretless
- Thread starter BenSantora
- Start date
, but secretly it bothers you that the overtones produced by the strings are fixed at multiples of the fundamental.
Fretless guys here are witty and funny. Really, after 40 years on bass, I'm loving how I can nail any frequency on the fretless - theoretically anyway. I do a lot of playing with recordings from the 60's classic vocal groups and the tunings are all over the map, because of course each band tuned a little differently. I love the challenge of it. I love prog too, but of course for me, Yes' Heart of the Sunrise is out of the question . . . lol!
If you have not seen it, I highly recommend the Tony Franklin video. Very informative and inspiring, and Tony's humor fits well in this thread.
One thing that is important in a band situation is to wait until guitard has finished tuning, and then give the keyboard player the nod and he tunes down half a semitone, you fret your notes back half a fret, and you give the guitard funny looks and lay into him about how his $2000 guitar is a POS while the drummer messes with the reference pitch on his tuner. Then let him tune, and repeat back the other way.
I actually had a similar experience recently playing my fretless. I heard an off tone and figured it was me. Adjusting, I looked and bingo -- it was not me. That guitar gets tuned every-other song.
Originally Posted by Ben Santora
Yes' Heart of the Sunrise is out of the question . . . lol!
AltGrendel
Not really, it just takes a bit more work . . .
You're right of course, but I have a Rickenbacker for that. I'm old school and enjoy playing with recordings. In discovering the fretless, I find (for me) that it shines for simple things like CCR's "Green River" or a country ballad. That is, instead of impressing myself or others that i'm playing a more challenging instrument, i like that I'm able to use my fretless to always play in tune with the other instruments on the recording, whether it's Lovin' Spoonful or Vivaldi, because of its microtonal ability. With all due respect to great, gymnastic fretless players like Jaco, Pino, Manring and Tony Franklin, my point is that the fretless can also serve beautifully for simple, warm bass lines, not just as a virtuoso instrument.
Yes' Heart of the Sunrise is out of the question . . . lol!
AltGrendel
Not really, it just takes a bit more work . . .
You're right of course, but I have a Rickenbacker for that. I'm old school and enjoy playing with recordings. In discovering the fretless, I find (for me) that it shines for simple things like CCR's "Green River" or a country ballad. That is, instead of impressing myself or others that i'm playing a more challenging instrument, i like that I'm able to use my fretless to always play in tune with the other instruments on the recording, whether it's Lovin' Spoonful or Vivaldi, because of its microtonal ability. With all due respect to great, gymnastic fretless players like Jaco, Pino, Manring and Tony Franklin, my point is that the fretless can also serve beautifully for simple, warm bass lines, not just as a virtuoso instrument.
Your original statement was apropos of nothing so having no context to speak to we fell back on wit! The ability to play any frequency is in fact a musical advantage and matching the pitch on old recordings just scratches the surface really. Vocal and string ensembles which also have no frequency restrictions will generally perform using just rather than even tempered tunings. Just intonation has a cleaner sound to it because all the intervals are very close to the "perfect" intervals that sound best to the ear. The trouble is that you have to "retune" your instrument for each different key you have to play in. The human voice can do this on the fly of course and a fretless instrument can too, except for the open notes which can be played fingered instead or by touching up the tuning on only four strings between movements if that is where the key change takes place.
Retuning the huge number of strings on a piano for a different key is hopeless as is changing the fret positions on a fretted instrument or the intervals of most wind instruments. Slide trombones are good to go though! So the even tempered tuning rules for many instruments and we just live with the interval errors it forces on us. Of the fretted instruments only the old viola de gamba could play in just intonation, as far as I know, and that is because it used tied on gut frets that could be repositioned to accommodate a key change.
I don't play violin but I am told that excellent violinists bend the pitches of notes even further when they are playing solos. Supposedly ascending and descending runs sound best when certain notes are played off the just intonation scale frequencies. And the ascending run is played differently from the descending run. The ability to play any frequency is indeed a wonderful musical gift. The ability to know and play the correct frequency in every given situation is a further gift that many of us, I suspect, do not possess. Certainly not I.
And that is the full story on the frequency, so sayeth Kenneth!
