If you've heard of composers like Charels Ives, Hába and Wyschnegradsky. (What a name! :O ) then you may be fairly familiar with the Quarter Tone Piano and some of it's whereabouts. However, if you have never heard of a quarter tone at all, then you've come to the right place! A quarter tone is what it sounds like, it is exactly 1/4 of the distance of a whole tone on a piano. Before I go any further, y'all have to realize this is not a beginner's theory course, this is some advanced stuff. On the piano we have 12 notes in an octave right? Each one of these notes to the next or previous notes, as in the distance from one consecutive note to the next is known as a half tone or half step right? Well, the distance of two of these half tones is a 1/1 tone or a whole tone. Ok, easy enough, now this is where your brain may die. So if we have half steps, put two together to get whole steps, then how to we make a half step?... We put two quarter tones together! Well, I should say the distance of two quarter tones. You may be thinking, but dude, there ain't no such thing as a quarter tone! That would be a lie, well on your piano, unless you have a priceless quarter tone piano or some fancy electronic modified instrument, chances are, your piano doesn't have quarter tones at all. :( BUT, that's not my problem lol.
No seriously though, if you want to play quarter tones, it's easy on the computer. If you want acoustic music, then you'll have to do what I'm doing and modify a guitar or use some kind of fretless instrument. And no, you can't modify a piano unless you're a genius and have LOADS of cash. Then again, you can always get steinway or Bösendorfer to build you one if you've got 85,000 dollars, but you're better off modifying something simple like a guitar or banjo, using a fretless, buying an already refretted guitar or going the electronic route. Another idea is retuning a piano but I have no idea how that would turn out so you're at your own risk, man.
For this blog though, a simple little program that is, WAIT FOR It.................. FREE!!!! Yup, no trial, it's nice and free. It's called Scala and what it does is allow you to make any tuning you want. (more on tunings later) you can get it here http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/
That's all you need for this to follow along. A real instrument would be better but you may have to figure out how you want to do that. For now, it's cool just to use scala.
Back to quarter tones, basically they are exactly half of the smallest interval on western instruments like guitar's and pianos. When we play music that uses intervals smaller than a half step we call it "microtonal" micro= small, tonal = notes, get it? Hehe, yeeah, ok. To illustrate this, let's use a piece of bread cuz that's more interesting than a scale.
We have a piece of french bread and normally, our bread is cut in such a way that there is 12 equally sized pieces. Those represent out 12 notes. Ok, now let's say each one of those pieces is cut in half. Now we have 24 pieces. This is EXACTLY the same way. We take the octave, divide it into 24 notes that are all equal distance from each adjacent note. They are ALL 1/4 step apart from each other. So I'm asked, why 24? Why not 11, 13, 17, 22 or 183? A) Because quarter tones are the easiest tuning to work with because it's nothing more than two versions of the 12 tone regular tuning a quarter tone apart. B) because there is already alot of music to look at in quarter tones so we're not going blindly, or deafly, I should say. C) I like it. Working with quarter tones allows us to Extend, alter and play around with the regular 12 notes in a way that didn't exist before. We get new sounds but we're not starting from scratch. I hate to say it, but if you have never heard quarter tone or any microtonal music before, it's gonna be weird, in fact, most people just will hear it as out of tune rather than completely new sounds. It takes a while for your brain to get used to it. Don't worry though, just keep an open ear and you'll start to learn to hear these new sounds.
Ok so now we have 24 notes to work with. Wow, that means we have 24 keys. Ouch! If you open up scala and go to file - new - equal temperment - 24 notes per octave - apply - Ok you will be able to play quarter tones. Play around with it, you may not really know what to do yet but that's ok cuz that's what we're here for! Keep reading, and onto about Tunings and Scales.
Tutorial Directory:
Tunings, scales and Intervals
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