Wow this is very cool. And over my head! Are there still seven notes in a mode in 19EDO? Is this related to the ..1-do 2-re 2-mi 1-fa 2-so 2-la 2-ti 1-do
2-re 2-mi 1-fa 2-so/do(repeat 1-2-2-1..) When you add up all of them you get 19 notes before do/so begins again? do you call that 20th note So,Do or Do/So? If the white Db was chopped off a piano and replaced with a piano transposd down a half-step beginning on a black "Eb" reed (or a black "B"??); is this the "layout" of 19 note master-mode?
hey look up EMI fret calculator or fretfind and they will give you measurements for any equal temperament and scale length. i believe fender strats are 25.5" (648mm)
Is there some mathematical reason why subminor and and supermajor intervals sound "bad" or is it simply because we've been trained to only look for traditional 12-tone intervals and everything else just sounds "out of tune"
@MrMss4 search 'harmonic entropy' (haven't trouble posting links in comments)
you can see that subminor 3rds (below 7:6) and supermajor 3rds (between 5:4 and 4:3) are in areas of high dissonance.
math aside, the intervals aren't so bad once they're familiarized. and context is important too; like how a bare tritone sounds dissonant, but in a chord (b and f in G7) it's not bad at all.
@iluvvsmp2 19edo definitely has some microtonal content, you just have to be very deliberate about using it. otherwise you end up in straight meantone, which is what most people associate 19edo with. but there are the other MOS scales like 8/19 and 5/19, and then all the tetrachord variations like the enharmonic. i typically think of 19edo as meantone-with-extensions.
I really appreciate this video. I'm a mathematician who writes music, and although I get the math behind these alternative tunings, you really presented it in some meaningful ways and gave some perspectives on this I wan't aware of. I've got 19 tone equal temperament on my Proteus software (which I use with Cubase) and you motivated me to try to use it.
@jailbreakir mostly self taught about anything microtonal. I first became aware of meantone temperaments years back when I took piano lessons, and more recently after some failed attempts with 31edo I started pursuing 19edo, later realizing it was a meantone and that I was already familiar with most of the concepts.
@uethanian there is a facebook you might want to join called xenharmonic alliance, there are a lot of members that are active and they all make guitars and stuff, i just recently joined but its really cool and great for learning about this stuff
Actually, the staff notation was developed before 12-EDO, so it lends itself very nicely to 19-EDO, which is a good mean-tone-type tuning, very similar to the tunings that were popular around the time the staff notation was developed into what it is today. I think that 19 can be more than a springboard into other tunings. Although it has limitations in representing non-western music, it certainly lends itself well to both classic and experimental (particularly ambient) western music.
You need to upload a video with a song on this! There is another guy with a 19 tone guitar on youtube, but he dosen't go outside the stuff that we already have in 12-tet.
I would love to see a video of you playing something on this that uses some of the intervals really unique to 19-tet (like the super-major and sub-minor thirds)
@kratanuva725 19-tET doesn't have much of those crazy super-majors and sub-minors like 31- and 34-EDO do. Technically, the intervals in 19 are mostly diminished, augmented, major, minor, and perfect. Check the interval ratios against those in low-limit just tunings. 31-EDO and 34-EDO, on the other hand are apt to super-majors and sub-minors that are farther away from the low-limit just intervals used for major, minor, diminished, and augmented chords. 19-EDO also lacks neutral intervals.
I haven't seen this kind of mind blowing music theory in a while. Excellent video, and great description of 19! The deletion of ambiguous notes is excellent, and the addition of the two new notes seems a wise method of composition. It does allow for more exploration of the tonal system and breaks the box of conventional construction. The math is all there. I think this is a much better standard than the Feiten "fix" of intonation problems and tuning bugs.
thanks! while feiten tuning, true temperament and the like are interesting, i think they're (pardon the expression) putting lipstick on a pig. i really do believe that if 19tone guitars/keyboards were commonly available, a significant proportion of musicians would take to it...i find, as i play more and more, that the theory behind 19edo isn't significantly more difficult than that of 12edo, and that the former can be treated as both an extension of the latter and as it's own system
@uethanian I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Equal and un-equal tunings are two separate things. And actually, in my opinion, un-equal tunings are superior to equal, as they provide different colors for each individual key. They can even be nearly equal, being nearly equal still gives a lot of charm. I actually came up with a nearly equal 19-tone tuning once.
you would still tune in fifths...just keep in mind that 19edo fifths are 7 cents flat from perfect, so there will be a slow beating heard between strings. for both cello and fretless bass you would shrink your finger spaces so that your 1st to 4th finger reach would be a major 2nd rather than a minor third. a less accurate way to think is to divide every major 2nd into 3rds rather than halves. message me if you want more info, comments are not long enough...
@uethanian do want! my mail is ericoschmitt@yahoo.com.br, or pm me
im thinking of building an 19tet array mbira to play it. its hard to start on a new tuning with untempered instrument like cello. its hard to trust on my ear for exploring harmonies
also, the best i could do would be double string, and 3 notes on bass (more would be hard to tune, and wouldnt sound nice, too low notes)
do you know any other cheap possibilities of making 19 instruments?
before you've introduced the idea of subminor and submajor qualities to me with this video, i was considering only "old minor and major" qualities and number of degrees in modes of 19edo system in this way: we have harmonic functions defined by triads in 12edo on 7 degrees: 1 tonic, 3 dominant, 3 subdominant. that's 7/12=x/19, where x is roughly 11 degrees for 19edo: 1 tonic, 5 dominant, 5 subdominant. but i haven't tried this yet. have to gather some time to find such "scales"
oh yes, that's the issue. considering the 4 qualities of 3rd (subminor / minor / major / supermajor) we do have 19 tones * 4 = 76 keys (as in 12edo: 12 tones * 2 (minor / major) = 24 keys). the most useful notation, which could be applied also in 31-edo, or 7-edo, etc. systems (taking the X-edo only as parameter and notating pitch with rhythm simultaneously) would be great step forwards
ok i see what you mean. yeah it's not a proper system for diatonic music. but at least for the present, i can write 19edo on the standard staff and immediately communicate with other musicians. i do think we should explore other notations, but one's that aren't necessarily based on 'key.' for instance, if you're constantly moving between G minor and G subminor, where do you define key? and that's just for diatonic stuff, beyond that a key system ceases to function at all.
1) discovering new layout of keys and constructing brand new instrument; 2) use layout of late rennaisance / early baroque harpsichords, which you have already mentioned. anyway, notating such music into staff is the real problem. one possibility i could see is extending current 5-line staff to 7-line, or 8-line staff, depending on how much degrees (harmonic functions) we want in 19edo modes (or scales)
i think the baroque 19-tone layout is probably the best option...it's possible do with MIDI keyboard parts, i just need a spare keyboard, money, and time.
i mentioned it just briefly in the video, but notation really isn't an issue; you treat it the same way as 12edo, except that flats and sharps are separated (no enharmonic equivalents). personally i would just get rid of key signature and add accidentals where needed. things do get complicated when writing in E# or Cb though...
for "converting current" keyboard to 19edo, i'd use only white keys of some reprogrammed synthesizer (with 7 12edo octaves, you can get some more than 3 19edo octaves with white keys only). another 2 options:
Wonderful video! I look forward to hearing some of your playing in 19TET. Could you share how you went about fretting this? How you measured out the intervals? Love your stuff in JI as well!
typically i used the calculator at ExMI, it will come up if you search it.
the math is a bit like this, if measuring from the nut
x-(x)(1/(nth-root-of-2)^k)
where x = scale length
n = octave division, in this case 19
k = fret number
i basically drew a center-line down both the neck and a radius block, lined them up and used the block as a guide for the hand saw. beyond that point, just like fret installation would normally be.
Well put, amigo. It'd be nice in a future video if you went into more of the moment-of-symmetry scales found in 19...the 9-note scale generated by a circle of subminor 3rds is pretty sweet, for instance, as is the 10-note scale produced by a series of the large minor 2nds. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the major 3rd can be divided into 2 OR 3 equal parts, the perfect 4th can be divided into 2 equal parts, etc. etc.
thanks! to be honest, i haven't really explored 19edo much from a non-diatonic perspective. it also doesn't help that i'm not a guitar player (now if i only had a 19edo keyboard....)
Thanks so much for this video! Sounds great.
hizzogg 2 days ago
have you written any more music than the two songs on your myspace? avidity part 1 sounds pretty sweet. i'd love to hear more.
returnofsimple 2 weeks ago
Damn, that sounds awesome. I need a 19 TET guitar!
psyoptica 1 month ago
One interestin thing you can do with 19 is use deceptive cadences to get to a new key out of the diatonic scale.
TaterGumfries 2 months ago
wow, thats really interesting. I never thought about modifying a guitar like this.
tkarmakid 2 months ago
buuuuuuu
Edmarperlu 2 months ago
Wow this is very cool. And over my head! Are there still seven notes in a mode in 19EDO? Is this related to the ..1-do 2-re 2-mi 1-fa 2-so 2-la 2-ti 1-do
2-re 2-mi 1-fa 2-so/do(repeat 1-2-2-1..) When you add up all of them you get 19 notes before do/so begins again? do you call that 20th note So,Do or Do/So? If the white Db was chopped off a piano and replaced with a piano transposd down a half-step beginning on a black "Eb" reed (or a black "B"??); is this the "layout" of 19 note master-mode?
GosseBosma 2 months ago
How would one go about re-fretting one's guitar to 19 tone equal temperament and is it really complicated and risky?
heavymetalkicksass1 3 months ago
do you have the 19-tone fretting measurement on a standard Fender scale? am planning to do that to a future guitar project, thanks!
xelalien 3 months ago
@xelalien
hey look up EMI fret calculator or fretfind and they will give you measurements for any equal temperament and scale length. i believe fender strats are 25.5" (648mm)
uethanian 3 months ago
@uethanian sweet! thanks man!
xelalien 3 months ago
Is there some mathematical reason why subminor and and supermajor intervals sound "bad" or is it simply because we've been trained to only look for traditional 12-tone intervals and everything else just sounds "out of tune"
MrMss4 4 months ago
@MrMss4 search 'harmonic entropy' (haven't trouble posting links in comments)
you can see that subminor 3rds (below 7:6) and supermajor 3rds (between 5:4 and 4:3) are in areas of high dissonance.
math aside, the intervals aren't so bad once they're familiarized. and context is important too; like how a bare tritone sounds dissonant, but in a chord (b and f in G7) it's not bad at all.
uethanian 4 months ago
I want to write music in alternative tuning systems so bad!!
earlier i thought 19tet wasn't exotic enough for my own taste, but now that i've learned some things about it it's actually really fascinating :D
iluvvsmp2 5 months ago
@iluvvsmp2 19edo definitely has some microtonal content, you just have to be very deliberate about using it. otherwise you end up in straight meantone, which is what most people associate 19edo with. but there are the other MOS scales like 8/19 and 5/19, and then all the tetrachord variations like the enharmonic. i typically think of 19edo as meantone-with-extensions.
uethanian 5 months ago
Shut up and play your guitar ...... hearing is like a thousand words..... play first then talk please
ronholgreen 5 months ago
Shut up and play your guitar ...... hearing is like a thousand words..... play first then talk please
ronholgreen 5 months ago
You seem like a really nice guy. I hope you will live a great life and meet wonderful people.
199385369 5 months ago
I really appreciate this video. I'm a mathematician who writes music, and although I get the math behind these alternative tunings, you really presented it in some meaningful ways and gave some perspectives on this I wan't aware of. I've got 19 tone equal temperament on my Proteus software (which I use with Cubase) and you motivated me to try to use it.
TheFrankHummer 5 months ago
this is such interesting stuff! where did you learn about 19 tone music?
jailbreakir 6 months ago
@jailbreakir mostly self taught about anything microtonal. I first became aware of meantone temperaments years back when I took piano lessons, and more recently after some failed attempts with 31edo I started pursuing 19edo, later realizing it was a meantone and that I was already familiar with most of the concepts.
uethanian 5 months ago
@uethanian there is a facebook you might want to join called xenharmonic alliance, there are a lot of members that are active and they all make guitars and stuff, i just recently joined but its really cool and great for learning about this stuff
jailbreakir 5 months ago
this is mind bending I love it
lexusmaxus 8 months ago
That was EXTREMELY interesting. I might try this one day, even if it's vey advanced stuff.
SteelSkin667 10 months ago
Actually, the staff notation was developed before 12-EDO, so it lends itself very nicely to 19-EDO, which is a good mean-tone-type tuning, very similar to the tunings that were popular around the time the staff notation was developed into what it is today. I think that 19 can be more than a springboard into other tunings. Although it has limitations in representing non-western music, it certainly lends itself well to both classic and experimental (particularly ambient) western music.
bostjan64 11 months ago
Nice, this has 19 likes.
kratanuva725 1 year ago
You need to upload a video with a song on this! There is another guy with a 19 tone guitar on youtube, but he dosen't go outside the stuff that we already have in 12-tet.
I would love to see a video of you playing something on this that uses some of the intervals really unique to 19-tet (like the super-major and sub-minor thirds)
kratanuva725 1 year ago
@kratanuva725 19-tET doesn't have much of those crazy super-majors and sub-minors like 31- and 34-EDO do. Technically, the intervals in 19 are mostly diminished, augmented, major, minor, and perfect. Check the interval ratios against those in low-limit just tunings. 31-EDO and 34-EDO, on the other hand are apt to super-majors and sub-minors that are farther away from the low-limit just intervals used for major, minor, diminished, and augmented chords. 19-EDO also lacks neutral intervals.
bostjan64 11 months ago
I haven't seen this kind of mind blowing music theory in a while. Excellent video, and great description of 19! The deletion of ambiguous notes is excellent, and the addition of the two new notes seems a wise method of composition. It does allow for more exploration of the tonal system and breaks the box of conventional construction. The math is all there. I think this is a much better standard than the Feiten "fix" of intonation problems and tuning bugs.
AggieTau 1 year ago
@AggieTau
thanks! while feiten tuning, true temperament and the like are interesting, i think they're (pardon the expression) putting lipstick on a pig. i really do believe that if 19tone guitars/keyboards were commonly available, a significant proportion of musicians would take to it...i find, as i play more and more, that the theory behind 19edo isn't significantly more difficult than that of 12edo, and that the former can be treated as both an extension of the latter and as it's own system
uethanian 1 year ago
@uethanian I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Equal and un-equal tunings are two separate things. And actually, in my opinion, un-equal tunings are superior to equal, as they provide different colors for each individual key. They can even be nearly equal, being nearly equal still gives a lot of charm. I actually came up with a nearly equal 19-tone tuning once.
kratanuva725 7 months ago
@AggieTau If you are interested in this kind of thing, here is another interesting article; anaphoria(dot)com/Secor17puzzle.pdf
kratanuva725 7 months ago
ohhh i have a request too: could you play Bachs Bourree? i was thinking one thing about this song(e minor):
it starts E F# G F# E D#
but i dont think that D# would sound good in 19tet, so maybe it should be played as Eb instead...
i mean, i also think that it should be an Eb if played with meantone 12 tuning, or Eb in 31tet too (Eb of 31tet and meantone 12 are very similar..)
anyway, can you post the first.. 4 bars maybe? playing on 12, and 19 with both D# and Eb??
ericoschmitt 1 year ago
what is the interval from one string to other?
i have a fretless bass, and i play cello too, i want to try 19 tone but since my strings are tuned in fifths i cant play it very well...
ericoschmitt 1 year ago
@ericoschmitt
you would still tune in fifths...just keep in mind that 19edo fifths are 7 cents flat from perfect, so there will be a slow beating heard between strings. for both cello and fretless bass you would shrink your finger spaces so that your 1st to 4th finger reach would be a major 2nd rather than a minor third. a less accurate way to think is to divide every major 2nd into 3rds rather than halves. message me if you want more info, comments are not long enough...
uethanian 1 year ago
@uethanian do want! my mail is ericoschmitt@yahoo.com.br, or pm me
im thinking of building an 19tet array mbira to play it. its hard to start on a new tuning with untempered instrument like cello. its hard to trust on my ear for exploring harmonies
also, the best i could do would be double string, and 3 notes on bass (more would be hard to tune, and wouldnt sound nice, too low notes)
do you know any other cheap possibilities of making 19 instruments?
ericoschmitt 1 year ago
before you've introduced the idea of subminor and submajor qualities to me with this video, i was considering only "old minor and major" qualities and number of degrees in modes of 19edo system in this way: we have harmonic functions defined by triads in 12edo on 7 degrees: 1 tonic, 3 dominant, 3 subdominant. that's 7/12=x/19, where x is roughly 11 degrees for 19edo: 1 tonic, 5 dominant, 5 subdominant. but i haven't tried this yet. have to gather some time to find such "scales"
cupakm 1 year ago
oh yes, that's the issue. considering the 4 qualities of 3rd (subminor / minor / major / supermajor) we do have 19 tones * 4 = 76 keys (as in 12edo: 12 tones * 2 (minor / major) = 24 keys). the most useful notation, which could be applied also in 31-edo, or 7-edo, etc. systems (taking the X-edo only as parameter and notating pitch with rhythm simultaneously) would be great step forwards
cupakm 1 year ago
@cupakm
ok i see what you mean. yeah it's not a proper system for diatonic music. but at least for the present, i can write 19edo on the standard staff and immediately communicate with other musicians. i do think we should explore other notations, but one's that aren't necessarily based on 'key.' for instance, if you're constantly moving between G minor and G subminor, where do you define key? and that's just for diatonic stuff, beyond that a key system ceases to function at all.
uethanian 1 year ago
1) discovering new layout of keys and constructing brand new instrument; 2) use layout of late rennaisance / early baroque harpsichords, which you have already mentioned. anyway, notating such music into staff is the real problem. one possibility i could see is extending current 5-line staff to 7-line, or 8-line staff, depending on how much degrees (harmonic functions) we want in 19edo modes (or scales)
cupakm 1 year ago
@cupakm
i think the baroque 19-tone layout is probably the best option...it's possible do with MIDI keyboard parts, i just need a spare keyboard, money, and time.
i mentioned it just briefly in the video, but notation really isn't an issue; you treat it the same way as 12edo, except that flats and sharps are separated (no enharmonic equivalents). personally i would just get rid of key signature and add accidentals where needed. things do get complicated when writing in E# or Cb though...
uethanian 1 year ago
for "converting current" keyboard to 19edo, i'd use only white keys of some reprogrammed synthesizer (with 7 12edo octaves, you can get some more than 3 19edo octaves with white keys only). another 2 options:
cupakm 1 year ago
Wonderful video! I look forward to hearing some of your playing in 19TET. Could you share how you went about fretting this? How you measured out the intervals? Love your stuff in JI as well!
wolfv11 1 year ago
@wolfv11
typically i used the calculator at ExMI, it will come up if you search it.
the math is a bit like this, if measuring from the nut
x-(x)(1/(nth-root-of-2)^k)
where x = scale length
n = octave division, in this case 19
k = fret number
i basically drew a center-line down both the neck and a radius block, lined them up and used the block as a guide for the hand saw. beyond that point, just like fret installation would normally be.
uethanian 1 year ago
Well put, amigo. It'd be nice in a future video if you went into more of the moment-of-symmetry scales found in 19...the 9-note scale generated by a circle of subminor 3rds is pretty sweet, for instance, as is the 10-note scale produced by a series of the large minor 2nds. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the major 3rd can be divided into 2 OR 3 equal parts, the perfect 4th can be divided into 2 equal parts, etc. etc.
igliashon 1 year ago
@igliashon
thanks! to be honest, i haven't really explored 19edo much from a non-diatonic perspective. it also doesn't help that i'm not a guitar player (now if i only had a 19edo keyboard....)
uethanian 1 year ago
Nice explanation.
barnaclebeau 1 year ago