EUGENE BRAIG IV wrote: > However, keyboards can tune every single note. Pluckers of fretted > things can only tune a few intervals and the rest is dictated by their > frets.
Pluckers of fretted things have more flexibility than keyboard players, not less, because it's a relatively simple matter to retune a lute course or two according to the key you want to play in, while on a harpsichord with two sets of strings (three is not uncommon) you have to retune five or ten strings for each not you want to touch up. Lutenists retune this way all the time, and occasionally adjust frets. > If you have frets that span all strings of a lute or guitar (third and > all), a meantone relationship will not necessarily be preserved in > crossing strings I'm not sure what you mean by "meantone relationship will not necessarily be preserved," and I think there's loose use of "meantone" in this thread to mean "unequal." > and will make less sense in remote keys; the problems of the > not-quite-tempered-at-all fretted instrument will become more evident > in remote keys. Again, I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that in remote keys the instrument becomes more out of tune, and indeed the relationships become inverted (e.g., some major thirds are sharper than ET rather than flatter), this is not different from what you get in keyboard music that goes into strange keys. > To really and wholly tune a guitar or lute in anything but equal > temperament, you would need sectioned frets like the experimental > guitars of Lacote and Panormo in the mid 1800s. I don't know what you mean by "really and wholly," but lute players used unequally tempered tied-on frets. The Gerle/Dowland instructions leave no doubt. I don't think anyone ever talked specifically about tuning a lute in quarter-comma or sixth-comma meantone; the physical vagaries of stopped strings make tuning and fretting a lute a more ad hoc operation. H To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
