Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
nipsnack 8 hours ago [-]
This is fantastic! What a find.
dofm 4 hours ago [-]
Regarding how people figured out the positions of the frets:
Frets used to just be thick material (wire, strips of flexible wood or treated cord) tied around the neck of the instrument. They were added, moved and removed for different scales, and "tuning" might have involved choosing fret positions that sat well with other instruments that could not be tuned, etc.
They were inherently movable. Sitar frets still are tied to the neck this way.
You can do this yourself with cable ties which make tolerable frets for experimental purposes.
So this would have allowed the knowledge of precise tuning to evolve over time.
brookst 44 minutes ago [-]
And the “right” answer is exponential, so it seems like it must be possible to do geometrically. Though I admit my geometry is weak enough that I don’t see how.
cwmoore 10 minutes ago [-]
Betteridge’s Law confirmed (no):
“One of the themes of The Lost Art of Logarithms is that many phenomena in our natural and human-made world can be interpreted logarithmically. That includes music but it does not include guitar frets.”
Also the author of the famous "Programming Windows" books.
devilbunny 54 minutes ago [-]
And the marvelous book Code. He explains how a digital computer works. Not sophisticated ones, not how it works on silicon, but how you turn relays into computation.
lioeters 17 minutes ago [-]
True, this book is a classic and worth mentioning.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold
When I discovered it, "the Petzold" was called "the Windows bible".
pazimzadeh 5 hours ago [-]
> How did people figure out the positions of the frets without calculators and precision measuring instruments?
If you had perfect pitch (maybe relative pitch is enough) then couldn't you just make marks in each position on the fretboard where it sounds like a new full note, and then go back and listen for the half-notes and do the same thing?
dvh 5 hours ago [-]
Take a guitar. Very gently put finger on string. Start sliding finger while continuously strumming with other hand. On some places (usually 3rd 5th 12th fret) the string will produce clean sounds, that's where the frets should be.
bgrainger 11 hours ago [-]
Hard to believe that article doesn't contain the phrase "slide guitar".
forinti 3 hours ago [-]
This is not a case of maths giving you the Blues.
JKCalhoun 11 hours ago [-]
I threw together a logarithmic slider for HTML (when I knew little about JavaScript and HTML). I hoped someone would take it and run with it and we would see more logarithmic slide rule calculators on the web.
I'm blocked for some reason, probably too much HN referred requests...
altairprime 13 hours ago [-]
Enable JavaScript and let the site issue a “not an AI” cookie and it should then be usable. (I have a JS button for this on my toolbar and it’s come in handy a lot recently..)
karim79 12 hours ago [-]
Are you serious you have a "I am not an AI" widget?
scubbo 9 hours ago [-]
I read it as "a button for re-enabling JavaScript"
karim79 12 hours ago [-]
Loved the article. Didn't love being blue-balled by the conclusion but still great stuff.
FpUser 12 hours ago [-]
The question is can those frets run Doom
HoldOnAMinute 14 hours ago [-]
Vibrating strings are Turing-complete
ycombiredd 11 hours ago [-]
That just reminded ne of something from here I had completely forgotten about. Someone had posted making sort of dubious claim of guitar power chords being Turing complete. I made some small improvements (as I saw it, chiefly around how they had implemented their clock) to the code they posted
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294766
which lead me down a rabbit hole of guitar tab as opcodes, which eventually lead to something useful after throwing away the silly guitar virtual machine, since I had now done the work of implementing far more than the simple tablature parsing code I intended. That project that resulted from the silly toying around with tab notation as machine code lead to a midi-to-tab generator, which lead to audio to midi to tab, and a bunch more.
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe
There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.
Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
Frets used to just be thick material (wire, strips of flexible wood or treated cord) tied around the neck of the instrument. They were added, moved and removed for different scales, and "tuning" might have involved choosing fret positions that sat well with other instruments that could not be tuned, etc.
They were inherently movable. Sitar frets still are tied to the neck this way.
You can do this yourself with cable ties which make tolerable frets for experimental purposes.
So this would have allowed the knowledge of precise tuning to evolve over time.
“One of the themes of The Lost Art of Logarithms is that many phenomena in our natural and human-made world can be interpreted logarithmically. That includes music but it does not include guitar frets.”
Discussed about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356314 (196 comments)
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold
Some reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44882.Code
If you had perfect pitch (maybe relative pitch is enough) then couldn't you just make marks in each position on the fretboard where it sounds like a new full note, and then go back and listen for the half-notes and do the same thing?
(Top, yellow slider, cannot be interacted with):
https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html
Sources (such as they are):
https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SlideRule
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.