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RE: Eventual end of guitars structural intonation issue
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MunichLuthier
Posts: 18
Joined: May 12 2015
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 RE: Eventual end of guitars structur... (in reply to estebanana)
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Hi again,
just short: johnguitar, I do not sell anything. I just invented an improvement and by patenting it, I made it available to the public so that everyone can see what it is and use it and if commercially used everyone knows that a fee for making money with my invention needs to be paid. I don't call this selling. ...and I never discredited anybody to sell my invention - saying so is discrediting me!
...and estebana: How can you say that I would claim my invention to be a panacea? I think I have stated clearly enough that my invention has limits and that it is not neccessary on some instruments and explained in long writing how templates were made in older times. And I never claimed that my system was the only way to the goal. There are some others, but mine is easy to build and easy to understand and - I also wrote that - can be realized with existing production equipments. So, yes it is good but its no miracle! And please do not link me with "intonation messiah" because first, nobody ever said so about me and I am the last who claims this for himself. But by posting it, you generate the impression, that this was a true saying of someone. Please do not do so!
Wow, its amazing how much resistance things can generate and how quick and yet subtle some people are offending the persons involved! I am a pieceful guy and all I did was improving one solution of an old problem. Take it or leave it, the world is so beautiful and wide, there is enough space for everyone!
Sr. Martins, thank you for making those points clear! You got me right!
Rufus, I am here and I came here to answer all questions and help others to understand my idea. So if one would directly ask me I am willing to answer as good as I can. But I do not want to invest the time to read through all statements and clarify all missunderstandings or wrong statements, especially now, as two people start offending in such a subtle way... You have one of the guitars that were corrected and you know how it soiunds and feels and I have some luthiers here in Germany that already use my patent, I have feedback from the recording studio, where Ricardo Havenstein recorded his last CD and they said they had never heard the pieces in such good intonation, I have some musicians here in Munich that borrow my steelstring (where the patent works very well to) for recordings at their studios and so on and so forth....
To me, thats proof enough and it just takes time and everybody is free to visit me whenever you are in Munich and try one of the guitars and hopefully sooner or later, a big factory will notice it and use it.
To all who want to know more, please ask!
Cheers - Michael
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Date May 19 2015 18:40:50
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Eventual end of guitars structur... (in reply to MunichLuthier)
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What I see in this thread, besides the usual ill-tempered snarling of some of the participants, is a certain lack of clarity. Nothing is to be done about the snarling, but I will attempt to clarify a little of what I think I have read.
To correct the intonation of an instrument, one must have in mind what the objective of the correction is. As I understand Michael Ruhe, his objective is to bring the guitar closer to equal temperament.
Equal temperament was not always the objective of tuning instruments. In fact, the temperament used by Bach was not equal temperament. It was one of the temperaments developed by Werckmeister
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werckmeister_temperament
and advocated by Bach's great predecessor Buxtehude. But Werckmeister's temperaments approximate equal temperament more closely than previous tuning systems used for keyboard instruments. ("Johann Sebastian Bach, the Learned Musician" by Christoph Wolff, pp. 228-229.)
Before Werckmeister at the end of the 17th century, North German organs were tuned by a variety of methods which improved the consonance of intervals, but sacrificed the ability to play in keys with more than four sharps or flats. Here is a keyboard of such an instrument, with 15 notes to the octave. As you can see, D# and E-flat are two different notes, and so on.
You can hear such organs on CDs. Look for those built by Arp Schnitger, for instance. Schnitger was born in 1649, and lived until 1719, when Bach was 34 years old. Bach is known to have played on some of Schnitger's organs. These organs sound much sweeter than modern equal temperament organs, as long as you stay within the keys to which they are limited. That's because the intervals are small ratios of whole numbers, not multiples of the twelfth root of two =2^(1/12), as in equal temperament.
By Bach's time, composers were writing music that was highly chromatic, modulating into distant keys. Beethoven went even further. Sacrificing consonance for versatility became a good tradeoff.
Our ears are accustomed to the slightly discordant sounds of modern organs and pianos. In other cultures, such as Balinese or Javanese gamelan, even wider discords are intentionally produced. But modern harpsichord players of European Baroque music seldom tune to equal temperament, and the difference is easily heard. The older tunings sound sweeter.
Even in more recent music, the string sections of symphony orchestras do not play in equal temperament. Typically they tend toward just intonation for the particular key they are playing in. Wind players are taught to adjust via embouchure, even though their instruments may be equally tempered by design.
Practical limitations have led to twelve frets per octave on the guitar, and twelve keys to the octave on keyboard instruments. In old school flamenco the harmonic vocabulary was more limited than in modern times. This is not to say that Ramon Montoya, Niño Ricardo and Sabicas never employed "extended" chords. They did, but they employed them less often than Paco or Tomatito. Montoya's and Sabicas's playing can be quite consonant. One suspects that they may have tuned to make prominent chords sound good, departing from equal temperament.
Guitars tuned to equal temperament can sound pretty good. Skilled players will adjust intervals of long duration to sound sweet, or cover the dissonance by vibrato, or both. The question arises: For a flamenco guitar with very low action and properly laid out frets, is compensation necessary, or would a skilled player make it play consonantly with no more effort than if it were uncompensated? Some in this thread say, "Yes."
Another question would be: Is equal temperament the proper objective, even for modern flamenco, or are the number of keys used few enough to make a different objective practical, as in the North German organs? People are playing flamenco in more and more keys, so maybe this tilts the table toward equal temperament.
There is no question in my mind that making a badly intonated guitar play closer to equal temperament will usually make it sound better.
The methods that I have read for doing this have maintained the fret spacing of 2^(1/12), but compensated nut and saddle for each string. It is certainly conceivable that changing the fret spacing, still with compensation for each string could produce the same effect, but I have not looked up Michael Ruhe's patent, nor worked out the math myself.
No personal attacks, please.
RNJ
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date May 19 2015 20:07:13
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Eventual end of guitars structur... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Richard Jernigan
For a flamenco guitar with very low action and properly laid out frets, is compensation necessary, or would a skilled player make it play consonantly with no more effort than if it were uncompensated?
Could it be that you meant "than if it were compensated"?
The question whether an effort is an effort or whether it is not an effort appears like moot to me.
Or am I maybe missing out on something?
And all this wayward blurb about which way of temper Ruhe´s frets could be about, only to drag away from the trivial fact of having rejected something from the get go that one was not willing to hear about.
Or has anyone here come across commonly offered classical or flamenco guitars that were made for anything other than equal temperament?
It should have been pretty obvious from the beginning of this thread by todays standards that a working on improving intonation will mean equal temperament.
Even if it weren´t so, how elsewise could tweaks on intonation be mentioned without explicitely naming the exotic case of a special temperament? C´mon now.
All that time of sabotaging and deviating could had been used to ask concrete questions about actual measures taken that can make an accomplished guitarist like Ricardo say:
quote:
Fingersätze können dadurch in jeder Lage gespielt werden, ohne Bedenken auf Präzisionsverlust bezüglich der Intonation, um nur musikalischen Kriterien Vorrang zu gewähren. Damit muss man sich als Gitarrist nicht mehr so sehr um den richtigen Ton bemühen, wo doch das Bestreben nach dem schönen Ton genug Aufmerksamkeit erfordert.
Which roughly means:
"Fingerings thus can be applied at any register without concerns about intonation, so that it can be preferably focused on musical criterion. From there, as a guitarist you need to care much less about the right tone, whilst aiming for the most sonorous one, is requesting enough of attention already."
Ruphus
PS:
I guess the last sentence is better translated this way: "you need to care much less about the right pitch, whilst aiming for the most sonorous tone,..."
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date May 19 2015 21:11:50
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MunichLuthier
Posts: 18
Joined: May 12 2015
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RE: Eventual end of guitars structur... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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Hi RNJ,
thank you so much for putting this effort in! And yes, you are absolutely right with all what you are saying. I did not want to dive to deep into history but you did it and explained that very well to us! And what is funny, that even at those days, people were fighting against the ones that wanted to stay with equal temperaments and Bach created facts by his pieces around the so called clock of keys.
I also studied about whether it was possible to generate a fretboard that would adapt to keys but it is not possible with fixed frets as the distances must vary in each key. Because of this and because of the fact, that guitars are used for all kinds of music, equal temperament was the only option to head for. And I fully agree to what you say in respect to the more sweeter sound as you name it. Even a very good equal temperament can sound sweet in certain keys and this is the observation that players make with either the correction or the patent itself.
Now let me add one more thing to this thread that is about how many factories and sadly some luthiers as well handle the matter of intonation. I have spoken to some big producers and they all admitted, that they do not check intonation after an instrument is finished. They put on strings, tune them one note to high, pack them and deliver them to the stores, where others tune them again and then they get sold. We have two quite known factories here in Germany and I know from the owner of one, that they have an average building time of 8 (eight) hours per guitar incl. laquer. There is no time for test playing, no time for test measuring. Their guitars are sold for 250 EUR to 5600 EUR and none of them is really checked!
As I write this, I do not accuse them, because it is the consumers that dont want to pay a decent price and this is forcing them to do so. I also know some luthiers that say that they use their grand grand fathers templates and never thought of the intonation because "we have always done it like this" and in the education of luthiers, they get measurement tables for the fretting and nobody ever discussed with them the issue of intonation. It is just widely accepted, that guitars do not always produce the right pitch. We have a very well developed eductional and professional training system here in Germany, Austria and other neighbors but all of the people I spoke to confirmed this - even one of the heads of the German chamber of luthiers (Zupfinstrumentenmacher Innung in German).
I also know some luthiers as Kirschner, Stenzel, Dammann, Ober and some more that care about intonation and they spend a lot of time with it and Dammann even has a room full of guitars that he will never sell because they do not match his standard. What I want to say with this is, that perfect intonation can not be seen as something that is in the focus of every maker. Again, no accuse, its just part of the system. I know this is not valid for most of the small workshops where the name is important and that are living on quality and trust. But this is defintely true for many big factories.
I bring this to your attention, because this is the point where improvements start. We do not have a perfect world of intonation and I am not one who wants to make money on a marketing issue. This is a real need and you just have to go into any store, play their instruments and listen carefully! I hope that you are lucky with your instruments and have no intonation issues, but the average player with the averagr guitar definitely has an issue. Maybe you can see it from this point of view.
Cheers to all! Michael
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Date May 19 2015 21:35:15
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