concerning tuning

I've played with some people (mainly guitarists) whose very integrity is greatly diminished even by the suggestion that they ought to use a tuner. My plea is: please use a tuner. Especially onstage. It's highly annoying for someone to spend 5 minutes audibly tuning at the end of which process the state of being in tune has not been achieved.

But that's a simple fix. Pushing a little further, however, we may ask: how do we know what "in tune" is? Or, if we do use a tuner, how does the tuner know? Basically that aspect of tuning (i.e. the theoretical underpinnings of a specific tuning system, and that there are tuning systems -- plural) is largely overlooked. Equal temperment (for keyboardists and fretted string instruments) has carried the day since the 18th century. Buuut it's not a system that everyone's comfortable with.

Click here to read a great article about the first major tuning system used in Western music, the Pythagorean. It gets very technical, but if you read the Basic Concepts section you'll be well on your way to understading a phenomenon faced by early keyboardists, viz. that not all keys were 'equal' in the sense that their respective intervals were not of the same sizes. (While you're there be sure to check out the parent site, too, medieval.org...there's a lot of fascinating, thought-provoking stuff to be encountered.)

The reason I mention this is because, at this point in the game, it seems that it might be worth exploring Pythagorean, or Just, or other tuning systems, largely because a lot of music made these days doesn't modulate wildly, or at all. At any rate it would be interesting to exploit the colors that the 'new' intervals provide, particularly in music that is free or consists of massive drones. Actually it would be interesting (again in freely improvised situations, but not only) to have different members tuned to different systems, again for the color of the 'new' intervals which would be produced...in this situation there could be unisons that wouldn't actually be a perfect unison!