Lesson Three: Tunings

When I say "tuning" it can mean at least two things. I might mean bringing an instrument into tune -- turning the pegs in the head stock of a guitar, or adjusting the tension of the drum head on a djembe.  I can also mean the way the way the notes are arranged on the instrument, as in "What tuning do you use for your guitar?"

There are standard tunings and alternative tunings. There used to be a lot more random non-standard tunings, actually. In the past, instrument-makers crafted their creations based on their own needs, or based on the system which made the most sense to the artisan. Even in modern times, you can really see variations in the way accordions are made all over the world. 

It was the Civil War which brought some degree of standardization to the manufacture of musical instruments, especially reed instruments and those in the brass family. The military marching band looked and sounded better when all the tubas, for example, were of the same form. 

In the middle of the 19th century,  a few years before the war began,  deep-sounding brass instruments were just beginning to be  coiled up like modern tubas. Before that, people played  great long "serpentine" constructions, a bit like the alp horns in the "Ric-o-la!"  commercials, but wriggly. From there, Eastern Europeans came up with a V-shaped 'bass horn" and elsewhere, manufacturers invented the helicon, which looked like a huge version of the round fox-hunt horn. 

At the start of the Civil War, there were tubas of different sizes, with a single bell opening pointing up, a single bell facing forward, a single bell which faced backward, and a double bell horn which let the player blast in two directions. And the fingering for the notes of a particular military march? Well, that depended on who made your baritone horn, euphonium, or tuba. How many valves does it have? Number of tuning slides? Hmmm. . . 

So that's the argument for standard tuning. Everybody's got three valves and if you push down the first and the third, you get the same note. But the down side of that is that you get a lot of "wrongness" going on and people can't be as creatively free, can't express things which stretch the limits. 

So at the non-standard end of things, we've got James Blood Ulmer. Ulmer has sat in with, and studied and learned with, such a variety of musicians. There was a time when he lived with a group of people associated with jazz leader Ornette Coleman and studied a theory called "harmolotics." Here's an audio track, via video, of Ulmer playing his guitar using a special, non-standard tuning. 

To simmer down the essence of that to the bare minimum, players in the 1970s were questioning traditional European models of what made good music. Coleman, Ulmer, and others -- many of them African-American -- wanted to know why the structure of music had to be melody plus accompaniment. Wasn't it just as valuable, they argued, to blend melody, harmony, rhythm, and other elements into a congruent whole? (Different from "atonal" music where there are no rules.)

Well, there was a point at which Ulmer found even Coleman's outside-the-box thinking too restrictive. (Also, as this interview makes clear, Ulmer found Coleman just too bossy.) So Ulmer experimented with something others have dubbed "unison" tuning; he turned all the strings of his guitar to the same note. But they sounded different because some strings are thicker and some are thinner, some are a straight piece of wire and some are twisted together when they are manufactured. Ulmer refused to play standard chords. Instead, he'd choose fingerings which brought out the best or most interesting sounds in the unison tuning. Ulmer has moved on over the years to experiment musically with new players, but during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed how much value can be found in non-standard tuning. 

Next time: standard tunings and modified versions of those.