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- Hacker News
- No mention of harmonics? Seems like a pretty big omission. I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole article but this seems like a classic, “I did the math but never actually touched the thing” type miss.by montjoy
- I have a friend who builds instruments. A bass player who worshiped Jaco, at first he made a couple fretless bass guitars.
One day he called me with a fascinating question. He was making his first guitar, and he wanted to know: Where do I put the frets?
by danbmil99 - > 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?
by pazimzadeh - Hard to believe that article doesn't contain the phrase "slide guitar".by bgrainger
- 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.
by dofm - This post is by the same author as the Lost Art of Logarithms. https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/
Discussed about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356314 (196 comments)
by lioeters - 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.
(Top, yellow slider, cannot be interacted with):
https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html
Sources (such as they are):
by JKCalhoun - https://vimeo.com/194116649
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.
by Syzygies