12-Tone Ultra Plus video
March 19th, 2008 Jon There’s some video up on the Guitar Player magazine website (www.guitarplayertv.com) that shows Matt Blackett demonstrating some chords on the FreeNote 12-Tone Ultra Plus guitar. He plays some Just Intonation Harmonic 7th chords and compares them to standard 7th chords, and he’s using a tone with a lot of distortion, so the curdled sound of the standard 7th chords is pretty obvious against the pure sound of the Just 7ths. He doesn’t play any Harmonic 11th or 13th chords, or any of the other available chords such as half minor, neutral, many minor, super major seventh, cluster chords, etc. but it’s a nice demo of one aspect of the fretting system.
The 13 O’Clock Blues Band played last night, we were playing the piece ‘Parallel Blues’ which uses Harmonic Rhythm. It seems that this concept of each Harmonic having it’s own rhythm is as fundamentally important as tuning, but is even more hidden and underground. Very few composers seem to have used this principle. Keeping 1/1 as the basis, it’s upper octave, 4/1, is used in this piece as the main rhythmic bar. Against this, the third Harmonic, 3, can be played in any of it’s octaves as 3, 6, or 12, etc. Playing it as 12 against the original pulse of 4 strongly suggests a 12/8 blues. This is in keeping with the Harmonic 7th chord, the first 7th chord in Nature and also widely approximated as the ‘blues chord’. It appears that the feeling of blues has been around for a long time!