On Fri, Sep 1, 2006, Sean Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > I recommend tied. It > will be true to the original and no more difficult to play. Your > luthier will put on the frets and they should last a long time.
in short, what he said :-) In time you will discover that you will want to make adjustments; its not all that hard, or even really all that mysterious. Modern folk guitar players spend a lot of time and effort retuning for certain pieces, often not realizing why. Sometimes it really is to deal with a new string that has stretched and or loosened from the vibration and stress of play and needs a pitch raise; more often it is to slightly retune so the guitar sounds better in a piece to be played in a different key than the previous piece. The frets of a modern guitar are 'fixed', and they are generally placed to produce notes whose pitch is 'equally tempered'. The instrument thought to be the inspiratino and ancestor of the lute is the 'Oud', an arabic instrument at the time of the crusades that is still extant today. Ouds have no frets at all (like violins) allowing their players to temper during play (which is a required skill). Unequal temperaments are thought to have been used during the renaissance, both from written theory, and because the music sounds more convincing when they are used today. The _New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians_ is a 26vv encyclopedia you will find at better local libraries, in it are several articles of interest which will give you an overview and bibl. for further reading. Not sure what the article heads are, but keywords to look up would include "Meantone", "Temperament", "Tuning". -- Dana Emery To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
