Hi, Dana and all, and best holiday wishes.
In re: David van O's speculation about Asian zithers: I'm not an expert, but I haven't found any duplicate-string tunings for Chinese guqin. Check at [1]www.silkqin.com if you're really interested, though. He's got all the tunings. I don't know a lot about guzheng, but my understanding is that the tuning is pretty standard and scale-wise, especially since the recent (last 150 years or so) Chinese commitment to the CDEGA pentatonic scale. Chinese (well, Han majority) necked instruments, like pipa, ruan, sanxian are, as far as I know, all tuned pretty much low to high, without reentrant or repeated notes, mainly since Chinese trad. music is essentially monophonic, so there's no paricular advantage in different tunings for making harmonies or chords more easily fingered. Same thing seems to go for similar Japanese and Vietnamese instruments. Also, assuming you're talking about working with tablatures, some kind of tab could make sense for gu qin (bridgeless, fretless, fingered), or Korean komungo (bridges, frets, fingered, and a really cool instrument!), but not so much for the guzheng or koto, since they're really played more like a harp, with the only way to vary the pitch of a given string being retuning or manipulating (depressing, shaking, etc.) the non-plucked part of the string. In re: cittern sources: Once again, it's been awhile, but tablature from any of the Northern Continental 16th c. cittern sources, Phalese, Le Roy, Gorlier, etc., will reflect the "missing" 4th fret, so "e" will equal "f" on a chromatic fretboard, and so on up the letters from there. Best to all, and keep playing, Chris. >>> David van Ooijen <[email protected]> 12/24/2009 8:26 AM >>> > Besides the strummed dulcimer, ignoring octaves and sympathetic drones, > can anyone think of an instrument which (sometimes) employs > duplicated-pitch open courses? Japanese Koto. I have no idea about the various other kinds (Korean, Chinese), but can imagine it's more or less the same for these: there are several standard tunings and for the rest anything goes. David -- ******************************* David van Ooijen [email protected] www.davidvanooijen.nl ******************************* To get on or off this list see list information at [2]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://www.silkqin.com/ 2. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute
