The Kite Guitar
We’ve seen that pure JI is impractical on a guitar, and we want the simplicity and transpose-ability of an EDO. But putting enough frets on the guitar to get everything really in tune makes it very hard to play.
Fortunately, there’s another way to get more notes besides adding frets: detune the strings. A guitar has a built in redundancy, because a note appears in more than one place on the fretboard. The open 1st string note (middle-E) also appears on the 2nd string at fret 5, the 3rd string at fret 9, 4th at fret 14, etc. If you tune every other string half a fret sharp, every other middle-E becomes a new note. Same for every note, and you now have twice as many notes (24-equal). The downside is that E appears in fewer places and it’s sometimes harder to reach. Before, a major 3rd was one string over, one fret back. Now, there’s a half-augmented 3rd there, and all your major chords sound very weird! The major 3rd is still on the guitar, but 4 frets away where it’s hard to reach. The perfect 4th and 5th are also hard to reach, because the nearby ones have been replaced with strange half-augmented or half-diminished 4ths and 5ths. So tuning your guitar this way gives you something new, but you lose a lot of what you had before.
The Kite guitar adds notes both ways. There are almost twice as many frets, and every other string is detuned by a half-fret. The Kite guitar uses 41-equal, a very accurate EDO. Omitting half the frets makes such a large EDO quite playable. It feels like and plays like an EDO half the size, e.g. 19-EDO or 22-EDO. The downside is that half the notes are hard to reach. But by an amazing coincidence, in 41-equal, and only in 41-equal, these are the more dissonant intervals! For example, 41-equal has good octaves and 5ths, but it also has octaves and 5ths that are ~30¢ sharp or flat of the good ones, that sound awful! Those intervals are moved safely out of the way.
Of course, those faraway notes in another context will be exactly the notes you want. It works out that in those contexts, your hand will naturally move to that part of the fretboard, and those notes will become the easily accessible ones. In other words, the layout of the Kite guitar automatically filters out the “wrong” notes, without you even having to think about it!
Unfortunately, the standard EADGBE tuning simply won’t work. Because then those slightly sharp/flat octaves and 5ths become all too accessible, and show up in the A and E barre chord shapes. Instead, the guitar is usually tuned in major 3rds (specifically, 13 steps of 41-equal). There are also some open tunings, but those limit your ability to modulate.
So the bad news is, you can’t simply pick up a Kite guitar and start playing it. There’s a learning curve. You have to learn new chord shapes. The good news is, there are fewer chord shapes to learn than you might expect. Here’s why: in EADGBE, the G-B interval is different from the other intervals. As a result, the C, D, E, G and A major chords all have different shapes. But the Kite guitar is isomorphic, meaning same-shape, and there’s only one shape to learn for all those chords. Because the intra-string interval is always the same.
There’s a few other drawbacks. Obviously the closer fret spacing is somewhat less playable (although no worse than a mandolin or ukelele). Omitting half the frets makes finding notes a little harder. Also the major-3rds tuning reduces the overall range of the guitar. Unless you’re using an open tuning, or playing with another guitarist, 6 strings is somewhat limiting, and 7 or 8 is best. And of course, there’s a learning curve in training your ears to hear all these new sounds. But that’s the fun part!
Finally, there’s sometimes subtle pitch shifts of a comma. These are the inevitable result of getting everything more in tune. As mentioned, a piece often requires both 9/8 and 10/9. On the Kite guitar, one uses whichever is appropriate at the moment. Sometimes one must use 9/8 immediately before or after 10/9, resulting in a pitch shift of a half-fret, about 30¢. Something similar can happen with 5/3 and 27/16, or with 7/4 and 16/9, etc. The good news is that like watching a magician’s trick, casual listeners are usually completely fooled and don’t notice the pitch shifts.
So there are disadvantages, but the advantages are enormous. Chords are only a few cents away from JI, and sound great! And there are so many harmonic options. There are four main kinds of 3rds: large major, small major, large minor and small minor. There are likewise four 6ths and four 7ths. There’s more of everything: two major chords, two minor chords, two dim7 chords, three augmented chords, four dom7 chords, etc.
The Kite guitar also gives you lots of melodic options. Going up one fret takes you up about 60¢. This is the perfect size — barely large enough to feel like a small minor 2nd and not a quartertone. In other words, in the right context, two notes a fret apart can feel like two distinct notes of a scale, and not two microtonal versions of the same note. And yet 60¢ is barely small enough so that the ear can be fooled by pitch shifts of half a fret (30¢).
60¢ is also small enough that two frets (about 120¢) still feels like a minor 2nd, although a large one. Three frets is a small major 2nd and four frets is a large one. Many melodic pathways from one note to another. And there’s more! The next string up has other 2nds in between these. There’s a mid-sized minor 2nd of 1½ frets and a mid-sized major 2nd of 3½ frets. Right between them is the middle-eastern-sounding neutral 2nd of 2½ frets. All these 2nds are available for heptatonic scales. Or you can use the large major 2nd and the small minor 3rd to make an African-sounding near-equipentatonic scale. Or you can play exotic octotonic, nonotonic and decatonic scales.
Naming all 41 notes in all 41 keys, and all the intervals, scales and chords they make, is no small feat. Kite’s ups and downs notation manages it by adding only two symbols to the standard notation. Any notes or chords without these new symbols are as usual. From C to G is still a 5th, a D major chord is still D F# A, etc. So all that music theory you spent years learning still holds true. Ups and downs are simply added in. The notes just above/below C are called ^C and vC (up-C and down-C). The intervals slightly wider or narrower than a major 3rd are called ^M3 and vM3 (upmajor 3rd and downmajor 3rd). Chords are named e.g. E^m and vGv7 (E upminor and down-G down-7). Everything has a straightforward, logical name.
In summary, the Kite guitar offers so much. You can play “normal” music and it sounds cleaner. Complex jazz chords can sound less dissonant. You can play barbershop. You can play middle eastern. You can get experimental. You gain so much, and lose so little!
