Ashamed to admit knowledge of this, but most of the balalaika family instruments tune with two unison strings (it's not a pair, or course, but two independent strings), starting with a-e-e for piccolo.
http://www.juststrings.com/balalaika.html a. On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:42:30 +0000 "Stewart McCoy" <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Dana, > > You ask if there are any instruments with open courses tuned to the same > note. Some tunings of the Turkish saz or baglama (long-necked lute-like > instrument) have the 1st and 3rd courses tuned to the same pitch. See > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba%C4%9Flama#Ba.C4.9Flama_tunings > > Although the five-string banjo in standard G tuning doesn't duplicate > the pitch of the open strings, the stopped notes on the 1st and 5th > strings duplicate each other from the 5th fret onwards. > > Best wishes, > > Stewart McCoy. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of [email protected] > Sent: 24 December 2009 00:09 > To: [email protected] > Subject: [LUTE] Q on odd tunings for plucked instruments > > Staff notation differes from tablature notation in many ways, but a > fundamental point of difference is that ordinary staff notation specifys > only the pitch of each note, and not where on the instrument it is > produced, for instruments with alternatives this leaves it up to the > player, and must be determined in advance, which is a difficulty when > playing by sight. > > Annotations on the score will tell a guitarist what position to play in, > an organist might have separate staves for each manual; a number of > conventions address this issue, but for a computer program it comes down > to what data is recorded internally. > > MusicXML records the fret and the pitch; but not the tuning (its a big > specification, might have missed that). Notation software can review > the > recorded note/fret pairs and deduce the open tuning (and therefore the > implied course) so long as two things are true - fretting must be > indicated as if it was chromatic, no two courses can have the same open > pitch. > > I suspect there are some historical cittern tabulatures which break the > first; and the second may be a problem for some scordaturas on > appalachian > dulcimer (which also has a diatonic fretting issue). The 5-string banjo > has a myriad of tunings that i have not explored, perhaps its fifth > string > is sometimes tuned-down to double the first? > > Q - > > Besides the strummed dulcimer, ignoring octaves and sympathetic drones, > can anyone think of an instrument which (sometimes) employs > duplicated-pitch open courses? > -- > Dana Emery > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > >
