Can guitar frets perform multiplication?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Absolute joy to read as a guitarist of 22 years, and having a degree in applied mathematics and a fondness for old calculators.

  As an aside, I love the simplicity of the interactive elements in TFA. Something I desperately wish I could have done with the side-by-side Galilean and modern guitars was instead of strumming at the actual fret on a given string to get the note to which that fret corresponded, be able to place "fret holders" by clicking at the intersection of the string and the fret that held the string down at that fret for you and then simply strumming the open strings so that you could compare how chords sound between the two guitars.

  by ddejohn
• Loved the article. Didn't love being blue-balled by the conclusion but still great stuff.
  by karim79
• The question is can those frets run Doom
  by FpUser
• I'm blocked for some reason, probably too much HN referred requests...
  by coverband
• 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..)
  by altairprime
• 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
• 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.
  by dvh
• Hard to believe that article doesn't contain the phrase "slide guitar".
  by bgrainger
• This is not a case of maths giving you the Blues.
  by forinti
• 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):

  https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SlideRule

  by JKCalhoun
• Oh my god, it's a beautiful way to explain how slide rules work. Without spending a single word. Thank you!
  by Gravityloss
• 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
• 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.
  by brookst
• >Frets used to just be thick material (wire, strips of flexible wood or treated cord) tied around the neck of the instrument

  Movable frets (they kind that you describe) used to be guts. Just like strings used to be.

  by coldtea
• 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
• Also the author of the famous "Programming Windows" books.
  by adrian_b
• 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
• This is fantastic! What a find.
  by nipsnack
• Wow, that is cool.

  I’m curious about Steve’s banjo. He usually ( but not always ) plays in Scruggs style, which should result in wear on the head down by where the pinky is anchored. But this banjo shows wear up above the strings, where a clawhammer player usually shows wear.

  Either this is one of Steve’s clawhammer practice banjos or the wear is from a previous owner, I’d guess.

  by RickJWagner