Jeff Olson <jjoca...@gmail.com> writes: > On 11/1/2023 6:37 AM, David Kastrup wrote: >> <https://events.williams.edu/event/viennese-bass-lecture-demo-bret-simner/> > > Thanks, David. Now I'm really smiling to have learned something new! > Your knowledge is more encyclopedic than Wikipedia. > > I once mail-ordered a fretted u-bass but exchanged it for the fretless > style, which I find easier to play (lighter touch) and more > expressive. Intonation can even be better on fretless as the strings > can develop nonuniformities in density. Wonder if that's why those > fretted basses from the 1770's died out?
I think it is more likely due to vibrato having become a tenet of string sound (partly because it hides the fundamental problem of intonation) and frets considerably reduce the amount and change the character of vibrato (I know that you can bend the pitches of the sitar a whole lot, but the character of its frets is quite different). Viols were used much more polyphonically than modern bowed strings, so vibrato wasn't really an option and the frets improved intonation more than they deteriorated it. For plucked/hammered/struck strings, the mathematical time/frequency unsharpness relation makes the intonation stand out less because of the tone decay (for example, few people notice that pizzicato strings sound higher than when they are bowed). -- David Kastrup
