Why I De-fretted My Guitar or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Untempered Tuning
I’ve recently discovered an interest in microtonal scales and the intricacies of tuning systems across the world. This started out while browsing YouTube videos a few months back, when I came across a video of a musician playing the qanun at a music conference. This Middle-Eastern zither (at least the Arabic type) has little levers near the tuning pegs that can be raised and lowered to raise or lower the pitch of the string by quarter steps. After experiencing this enlightenment, I looked more into Middle-Eastern music theory.
Middle-Eastern music theory is based largely around maqamat which can be seen as a counterpart to Western modes, or scales that start on different pitches but keep the same notes to provide different functionality and moods. The most common modes being the Ionian and Aeolian or major and minor scales respectively. However, where modes can be played in any key and still be “the same,” maqamat do not have this leisure and the reason boils down to a fundamental difference in the building blocks of the tuning systems.
In the common Western tuning system (specifically on the piano — for choirs and string instruments, this gets a bit sketchy), each note is a set distance apart. For example, each key on the piano is 100 cents apart which adds up to 1200 cents per octave and then the same scale can be started over again. This system is called Equal Temperament and while it may seem pretty logical and certainly has been quite successful, it doesn’t quite match up to the natural harmonics that are the building blocks for acoustics.
Each note is naturally made up of one fundamental tone and many different overtones, the different volumes of each help create the timbre specific to each instrument and person. Pythagoras worked out these natural harmonics and indeed notes in general to be created by ratios of whole numbers representing string length (and now we know these can relate to sound frequency). For example, if one started with a note with the frequency of 100 Hz., doubling that (2/1) would give the interval between the first and second harmonics as an octave. Multiplying that by 3/2 gives the next interval of a perfect fifth between the second and third harmonics. And so the pattern of ratios continues. This perfect fifth, however, is the base of many tuning systems including the one maqamat are tuned around.
Maqamat are constructed around these perfect fifths which leaves the rest of the notes slightly different than the previously described equal tuning system on the modern piano. Gallivanting around the circle of fifths shows that there are twelve fifths before the notes circle around back to the original one up seven octaves. If you take Pythagoras’s simple system of harmonics, called Just Intonation, and do the math, it results in (3/2)^12=129.746 and 2^7=128 so perfect fifths simply don’t add up to perfect octaves. They are slightly wider than what an octave calls for. This means that tuning systems necessitate compromises and innovations, hence Equal Temperament. However, maqamat do not compromise these “perfect” intervals by using an equal tuning, instead they use a just intonation for these fifths which leaves uneven spaces between the notes in the scales and therefore, these scales are different at a microtonal level when they start on different notes.
In order to justly represent these sounds, the oud (Middle-Eastern lute) does not have frets, much like a violin. This allows oud players to play to a high degree of accuracy these maqamat that have been passed down in an aural tradition. However, an instrument like the piano cannot handle quarter tones — though I urge you to listen to Charles Ives’ Quarter Tone Pieces for two pianos where one is tuned a half step down — and is usually tuned to an equal temperament so is utterly useless for many of the maqamat. Slightly less so is the guitar with its easily tuneable strings and potential for use with a slide which removes the barrier of the fret for playing notes and can play any note along the neck of the guitar including quarter tones and slight adjustments in pitch.
With this in mind, I decided to take the frets off an old guitar I had laying around. The process itself was fairly simple, just taking a small screwdriver and brute forcing the fret out from the end but some tutorials recommend using a soldering iron to heat the fret (and potentially glue holding it in) and special fret pulling pliers. After the frets were out, I sanded the fretboard to remove the roughness left from the trenches and bristly edges where the frets used to be and then filled it in with wood filler and sanded some more. You can see the finished product below.
I make no claim to accurately play maqamat with all their intricacies (yet!), but here I am, attempting to play maqam saba with justly intonated intervals and quarter steps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM_pAzYRSZk
Further reading:
