Hey all, instead of my normal pinned patreon comment, I'd like to use this space to shoutout another creator! @FernandoPerezGuitar has a video about how to make fretlets (microfrets) at home with paper clips - now, you truly have no excuse! Anyway its a great resource for what I'm doing here, link to his video is in the description!
I used to be in a jazz band with a couple Lebanese fellows. One of them was a pretty good oud player and he taught us a few traditional folk songs that included a lot of microtonality. The nice thing about playing an upright bass is I didn’t need to worry about the frets getting in the way!
Hahaha, that’s why I mostly play fretless myself! That’s awesome, I wish there was more Oud player in my area that I could connect with. Such a beautiful instrument.
I was gonna mention Tolgahan Cogulu but you brought him up yourself. That system is pretty nice. Both the more professional slidable frets (he also has inserts to get a section to be flat and therefore fretless as well) and the Lego frets his son invented
I’ve gotten into microtonal music over the course of the last year, and now I’m hooked on it. I’m glad they make micro-frets for guitars and basses (I’ll have to look at picking some up). Thanks for all of your content Levi! Keep up the great work my man.
Cool to see the Esteve bass! I got one as a teenager (20 years ago this year) and it's served me really well since! The style I play (scandinavian folk/trad) also has lots of non-equal-tempered stuff going on, though I used the other solution to enable that: I just removed the frets. :)
I wish I'd known that it was _tastinos_ before I got salsa all over my fretboard. On the subject of accessibility, I stumbled upon an idea some time ago, that I think is pretty good: I wanted a chromatic kalimba and I decided to just buy two diatonic ones and retune one to Cb. That worked just fine. Then, it occurred to me that I could buy two more and tune them to the quarter-tones. That also worked just fine. I did buy a high-end tuner for professional piano tuners, which was a pretty big investment, but, to the best of my knowledge, it's the only one on the market that allows presets for microtonal tunings. It would be possible to tune kalimbas to quarter-tones more cheaply, but with more effort. Apart from the tuner, it was a relatively low-cost and low-tech solution.
I used to play a lot of jazz and funk on bass, I stuck rigidly to a 12 tone system in theory BUT those styles themselves allow for chromatic runs and to build up a ton of dissonance quite organically. I had quite a couple licks just to either slip an extra note in-between a chromatic run to give myself something extra to play to help with timing, or to add a bit of tension to an otherwise easy to listen to interval to resolve it immediately. I suppose for an instrument with more strings than fingers, those extra frets are very beneficial, but if I weren't using a fretless bass, I'd just carefully bend them "in tune" :-). I never managed to use microtones melodically and for it to still sound appealing. I have a lot of respect with people who experiment and work with it, I love Jacob Collier's work where he really manages to do it, rather than as a gimmick, really to incorporate it such that you feel something is going on but it still sounds completely natural. You sound absolutely gorgeous on that bass btw!!
Wowwwwwww levi that's incredible, I'm doing exactly this same experiment with microfrets but on the acoustic guitar, I'm trying to create a kind of subset keeping the 12 traditional tones but in 31 EDO, that is 19 meantone
Microtones are the norm outside western music. Most eastern lutes play microtones with either frets like Tar, Bağlama, or fretless like shamisen, Oud, sarod. One note though Maqam music is not played in Iran, they have a different system called Dastgah
Older European folk wind instruments (some still in use in Italy and the Balkans) have the finger holes all equidistant and of identical size, resulting in a sort of "wide" 8edo
I tried 3D printing fretlets and they were really fun to experiment with, until my design broke… By the way, I wish more people would visualize maqamat like you do at 4:59. The structure becomes pretty clear.
If you want to hear some microtone music in a in a western framework check out Alaa Zouiten's album "Talking Oud" it is so good! Especially "Alaa's Dreams" what a ride
I started music with the Violin, and ever since picking up guitar and piano with an ambition to start producing music, I have been finding it incredibly interesting how differently you think about music with these different instruments. Fretless stringed instruments are more difficult to play "well" within the standard tuning framework so many people I think are drawn to instruments that feel more structured, like the piano and guitar. I had always wondered where the other notes had "gone" when examining mysic theory. Why do we call two notes by two different names? And because I'm a nerd that ended up leading me here. Now it has all clicked into place. There *are* missing notes, Ab *is* different from G#. There *is* a reason why the spacing of the fingering on a violin neck feels uneven, as though there are gaps that give possibility for slicing tones into smaller and smaller frequencies. I saw a video several months ago explaining the way that microtonality is standard in much of the world outside the Western framework, which is what makes it sound so "different" to a Western ear, and that the Western tuning being the sort of pop culture standard is what causes the main stream to lump other ancient music traditions into narrow and stereotypical categories, and how much of a shame that is when you consider the endless possibilities you can explore with microtones. I didn't quite understand the full scope of what that video was discussing, but now that I have begun learning music theory and production and stumbled upon another musician explaining this concept, it clicks. I am super keen to try using microtones within my music, thank you for creating such concise explanations of this concept, even though it is niche. I think that tastinos explain it best to people who may struggle tp understand this concept otherwise, because youre literally seeing how a note can be divided up even further. The points along a string you used to demonstrate in a different video was also a good visualization. I really appreciate the well done visuals, along with giving us an audio example. It helps a lot to help wrap your head around the concept
In case you don't know this already, most if not all tuning systems are based on the overtone series. The overtone series results from "harmonic motion" of a "vibrating system", like the string on a violin or a guitar or the column of air inside a wind instrument. The overtones are whole number multiples of the fundamental pitch. To get a scale using the overtone series, you can multiply the fundamental pitch, say 110 Hertz (Hz, or cycles per second) by 2, 3, 4, 5 ... and then divide each result by 2 one or more times until you get a value less than two times the fundamental pitch, in this example, < 220 Hertz (Hz). In equal-tempered tuning, a method using the twelfth root of 2 (or an approximation) is used to find the fret positions on a string, because it produces values close to the method described above for finding overtones. It also has the property that multiplying a value 12 times by the twelfth root of 2 gives you a value twice that of the one you started with (i.e., the octave). This is how you get a 12-tone (chromatic) scale. If you used the 24th root of two, you can get a quarter-tone scale and so on. If you're interested in this subject, I recommend the book "Horns, Strings and Harmony" by Arthur Benade and published by Dover Books to start with. He also wrote a more comprehensive book called "Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics".
I'm not a mathematician but I am a computer programmer and I've done a little work in this area. For example, I wrote a program for generating scale layouts and one for calculating frequencies for overtones. I'm particularly interested in tunings using pure intonation, i.e., non-tempered tunings using the overtone series, as well as microtones. It's all freely available, if anyone's interested. I haven't been working on these things lately, but I plan to get back to it.
@@SumangalSinhaRoy Yes, as it happens. Sorry, I didn't get a notification about your reply, and when I replied yesterday, my message failed to post (and yours disappeared for awhile). I hope it works this time. If you have trouble finding it, please feel free to send me an email.
Dude, I kept rewinding that Totino's clip 3:58. I know it's "just" stop motion and cutting, but I really how you integrated the callback in a visual way. This video must have taken ages to make.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 thank you! It was difficult for sure. More so for the opening stop motion sequence. I accidentally hit my bass out of place in the middle of the shoot and didn’t want to reshoot 100 frames, so I just rolled with the mistake 😂 All told, from script to final export, it took about a week.
What would be the best edo to use for fixed guitar frets? 31 has really good 3rd and neutrals plus a bunch of other colours but it's too dense for guitar, are there any non octave scales that you think would work while maintaining decent familiarity and spacing?
I make microtonal music with Synthesizers. And I love this kind of experimental way to make music. I specialize in 31 edo. And of course the regulary 12 TET System is also in use. Its so interestingt the way to create new harmonies, chords and melodies. Microtonality is so underrated. Do you know, that the arabic/middle east music based on 24 TET and the Indian music use the 22 TET System?
Heck yeah, a fellow 31 nerd! Im more familiar with 24tet than 22 for sure. I'm sure i'll get around to 22 eventually. For now, too much to explore in 31
@@LeviMcClain Yes. 31 EDO is in my opinion the best alternative tonesystem. Because it solves alot of problems that exists in 12 EDO. The most interesting the missin halftones "E#"and "B#" and thast one thing of many that makes the system so interesting.
I don't claim to be an expert in Indian music, but while it includes use of 22 notes per octave, they are not equally spaced, so it is 22, but not 22 TET. I think the Arabic scale may be closer to actual quarter-tones, but I wouldn't count on them to be equally spaced, just as for a while during the Baroque and Classical period, we had 12 notes per octave but not equally spaced. It is like how 12 tone equal temperament was discovered here and in China in the 1500s, and maybe even earlier in China, but it took a long time to actually catch on widely here, so after open-ended meantone replaced Pythagorean in the late Renaissance/early Baroque, the well-tempered but not equal-tempered 12 note systems replaced open-ended meantone from the mid-Baroque though the mid-Romantic era. On topic for this video, to get meantone or well-tempered tuning on viols and lutes/guitars/mandolins, split frets were often used, and the frets were (at least often) tied onto the necks of the instruments of the Renaissance and Baroque, so they could be moved.
@xavierbromius yeah, I have an old jazz album under my name, and a synth pop ep under “Levi & Bohdi”, but they sound so wildly different from what I do now, you’ll find little of what I do here in them. Hopefully I’ll have something released sometime this year
Please try out my Yarman-24/31cc makam scales under Ableton Live 12. They are more intricately thought-out compared to basically taking multiples of 12-tET on the fretboard.
@@Plantids absolutely nothing! Most of my basses are fretless. Not everyone can afford them tho, so this is a cheap alternative that has the added bonus of not having to worry about intonation all the time (:
It's a completely different sound and feel. With frets, you can calculate pitches exactly, plus/minus a certain amount of inevitable error. With a fretless instrument (or instruments like trombones or swanee whistles), one can achieve good intonation with practice, and some people are just born with it, but there's always some uncertainty. Intonation doesn't have to be perfect to sound good (or right).
2:37 hmm… I don’t think I’ve seen the microtonal thing done before that actually sounded musical and not “off” in a modern western style that wasn’t TRYING to be dissonant (horror music). 🤔
@@Edbrad check out my video on Orwell 9 - it’s called “I broke music theory” there is a piece in the middle that I consider extremely not dissonant. Also! Check out JI stuff too (:
@@ramonzeira totally could! If you have the time resources and money to either de - fret your instrument, or buy a fretless. This is just cheap, quick, and you don’t need to be focusing on intonation when you should be focusing on expression
Hey all, instead of my normal pinned patreon comment, I'd like to use this space to shoutout another creator! @FernandoPerezGuitar has a video about how to make fretlets (microfrets) at home with paper clips - now, you truly have no excuse! Anyway its a great resource for what I'm doing here, link to his video is in the description!
Let me add @microtonalguitar and @hearbetweenthelines as a recommendation for other viewers.
I used to be in a jazz band with a couple Lebanese fellows. One of them was a pretty good oud player and he taught us a few traditional folk songs that included a lot of microtonality. The nice thing about playing an upright bass is I didn’t need to worry about the frets getting in the way!
Hahaha, that’s why I mostly play fretless myself! That’s awesome, I wish there was more Oud player in my area that I could connect with. Such a beautiful instrument.
I was gonna mention Tolgahan Cogulu but you brought him up yourself. That system is pretty nice. Both the more professional slidable frets (he also has inserts to get a section to be flat and therefore fretless as well) and the Lego frets his son invented
Yeah, I really like his adjustable neck concept. Can’t wait to try one out myself!
I’ve gotten into microtonal music over the course of the last year, and now I’m hooked on it. I’m glad they make micro-frets for guitars and basses (I’ll have to look at picking some up). Thanks for all of your content Levi! Keep up the great work my man.
@@mfischer387 thank you!! Such a fun thing to be hooked on. Good luck in your journey man!!
The harmonic arpeggio at 8:01 after the djent goes crazy my dude
That is an absolutely gorgeous bass you have there. I didn't even know that they made acoustic basses like that.
Thank you! It’s an Esteve. Really really well made bass for sure.
Cool to see the Esteve bass! I got one as a teenager (20 years ago this year) and it's served me really well since! The style I play (scandinavian folk/trad) also has lots of non-equal-tempered stuff going on, though I used the other solution to enable that: I just removed the frets. :)
Love the framework of microtones as both modern and ancient!
@@GalenDeGraf Yes! So important to recognize where we came from and also hold space for where we are going
What a gorgeous video - thank you for making this Levi!
@@MichaelWatts high praise coming from the man who makes the most gorgeous acoustic guitar videos on the entire platform!! Thanks Michael!
I wish I'd known that it was _tastinos_ before I got salsa all over my fretboard.
On the subject of accessibility, I stumbled upon an idea some time ago, that I think is pretty good: I wanted a chromatic kalimba and I decided to just buy two diatonic ones and retune one to Cb. That worked just fine. Then, it occurred to me that I could buy two more and tune them to the quarter-tones. That also worked just fine. I did buy a high-end tuner for professional piano tuners, which was a pretty big investment, but, to the best of my knowledge, it's the only one on the market that allows presets for microtonal tunings. It would be possible to tune kalimbas to quarter-tones more cheaply, but with more effort. Apart from the tuner, it was a relatively low-cost and low-tech solution.
Have a good week if youre seeing this!
You too!
I used to play a lot of jazz and funk on bass, I stuck rigidly to a 12 tone system in theory BUT those styles themselves allow for chromatic runs and to build up a ton of dissonance quite organically. I had quite a couple licks just to either slip an extra note in-between a chromatic run to give myself something extra to play to help with timing, or to add a bit of tension to an otherwise easy to listen to interval to resolve it immediately. I suppose for an instrument with more strings than fingers, those extra frets are very beneficial, but if I weren't using a fretless bass, I'd just carefully bend them "in tune" :-).
I never managed to use microtones melodically and for it to still sound appealing. I have a lot of respect with people who experiment and work with it, I love Jacob Collier's work where he really manages to do it, rather than as a gimmick, really to incorporate it such that you feel something is going on but it still sounds completely natural.
You sound absolutely gorgeous on that bass btw!!
Wowwwwwww levi that's incredible, I'm doing exactly this same experiment with microfrets but on the acoustic guitar, I'm trying to create a kind of subset keeping the 12 traditional tones but in 31 EDO, that is 19 meantone
@@danielgiovannimusic7278 that is awesome man!! Keep me updated on your progress!
how has this not blown up
It’s a niche of a niche of a niche 😅😂
Microtones are the norm outside western music. Most eastern lutes play microtones with either frets like Tar, Bağlama, or fretless like shamisen, Oud, sarod. One note though Maqam music is not played in Iran, they have a different system called Dastgah
@@world_musician yes
Older European folk wind instruments (some still in use in Italy and the Balkans) have the finger holes all equidistant and of identical size, resulting in a sort of "wide" 8edo
If you made the microfrets tall, you could put down a different EDO and play them over the normal frets.
I tried 3D printing fretlets and they were really fun to experiment with, until my design broke… By the way, I wish more people would visualize maqamat like you do at 4:59. The structure becomes pretty clear.
This would be great in metal
If you want to hear some microtone music in a in a western framework check out Alaa Zouiten's album "Talking Oud" it is so good! Especially "Alaa's Dreams" what a ride
I’ll check it out! Thanks!
I started music with the Violin, and ever since picking up guitar and piano with an ambition to start producing music, I have been finding it incredibly interesting how differently you think about music with these different instruments. Fretless stringed instruments are more difficult to play "well" within the standard tuning framework so many people I think are drawn to instruments that feel more structured, like the piano and guitar. I had always wondered where the other notes had "gone" when examining mysic theory. Why do we call two notes by two different names? And because I'm a nerd that ended up leading me here. Now it has all clicked into place. There *are* missing notes, Ab *is* different from G#. There *is* a reason why the spacing of the fingering on a violin neck feels uneven, as though there are gaps that give possibility for slicing tones into smaller and smaller frequencies. I saw a video several months ago explaining the way that microtonality is standard in much of the world outside the Western framework, which is what makes it sound so "different" to a Western ear, and that the Western tuning being the sort of pop culture standard is what causes the main stream to lump other ancient music traditions into narrow and stereotypical categories, and how much of a shame that is when you consider the endless possibilities you can explore with microtones. I didn't quite understand the full scope of what that video was discussing, but now that I have begun learning music theory and production and stumbled upon another musician explaining this concept, it clicks. I am super keen to try using microtones within my music, thank you for creating such concise explanations of this concept, even though it is niche. I think that tastinos explain it best to people who may struggle tp understand this concept otherwise, because youre literally seeing how a note can be divided up even further. The points along a string you used to demonstrate in a different video was also a good visualization. I really appreciate the well done visuals, along with giving us an audio example. It helps a lot to help wrap your head around the concept
In case you don't know this already, most if not all tuning systems are based on the overtone series. The overtone series results from "harmonic motion" of a "vibrating system", like the string on a violin or a guitar or the column of air inside a wind instrument. The overtones are whole number multiples of the fundamental pitch. To get a scale using the overtone series, you can multiply the fundamental pitch, say 110 Hertz (Hz, or cycles per second) by 2, 3, 4, 5 ... and then divide each result by 2 one or more times until you get a value less than two times the fundamental pitch, in this example, < 220 Hertz (Hz).
In equal-tempered tuning, a method using the twelfth root of 2 (or an approximation) is used to find the fret positions on a string, because it produces values close to the method described above for finding overtones. It also has the property that multiplying a value 12 times by the twelfth root of 2 gives you a value twice that of the one you started with (i.e., the octave). This is how you get a 12-tone (chromatic) scale. If you used the 24th root of two, you can get a quarter-tone scale and so on.
If you're interested in this subject, I recommend the book "Horns, Strings and Harmony" by Arthur Benade and published by Dover Books to start with. He also wrote a more comprehensive book called "Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics".
We need more mathematicians in microtonalality.(and music in general.) That's where a good chunk of musical innovation comes from.
I'm not a mathematician but I am a computer programmer and I've done a little work in this area. For example, I wrote a program for generating scale layouts and one for calculating frequencies for overtones. I'm particularly interested in tunings using pure intonation, i.e., non-tempered tunings using the overtone series, as well as microtones. It's all freely available, if anyone's interested.
I haven't been working on these things lately, but I plan to get back to it.
@@laurencefinston7036 On github or such?
@@SumangalSinhaRoy Yes, as it happens. Sorry, I didn't get a notification about your reply, and when I replied yesterday, my message failed to post (and yours disappeared for awhile). I hope it works this time. If you have trouble finding it, please feel free to send me an email.
Great video ! Where can I find more of your song at 2:20 ?
It’s from a video I did a bit ago on Heptatonic Nusecond, called “Understanding 31 EDO’s Most Challenging Scale”
Dude, I kept rewinding that Totino's clip 3:58. I know it's "just" stop motion and cutting, but I really how you integrated the callback in a visual way. This video must have taken ages to make.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 thank you! It was difficult for sure. More so for the opening stop motion sequence. I accidentally hit my bass out of place in the middle of the shoot and didn’t want to reshoot 100 frames, so I just rolled with the mistake 😂
All told, from script to final export, it took about a week.
What would be the best edo to use for fixed guitar frets? 31 has really good 3rd and neutrals plus a bunch of other colours but it's too dense for guitar, are there any non octave scales that you think would work while maintaining decent familiarity and spacing?
Cool
@jonathanplug3904 🙏🙏🙏
I make microtonal music with Synthesizers. And I love this kind of experimental way to make music. I specialize in 31 edo. And of course the regulary 12 TET System is also in use. Its so interestingt the way to create new harmonies, chords and melodies. Microtonality is so underrated. Do you know, that the arabic/middle east music based on 24 TET and the Indian music use the 22 TET System?
Heck yeah, a fellow 31 nerd! Im more familiar with 24tet than 22 for sure. I'm sure i'll get around to 22 eventually. For now, too much to explore in 31
@@LeviMcClain Yes. 31 EDO is in my opinion the best alternative tonesystem. Because it solves alot of problems that exists in 12 EDO. The most interesting the missin halftones "E#"and "B#" and thast one thing of many that makes the system so interesting.
I don't claim to be an expert in Indian music, but while it includes use of 22 notes per octave, they are not equally spaced, so it is 22, but not 22 TET. I think the Arabic scale may be closer to actual quarter-tones, but I wouldn't count on them to be equally spaced, just as for a while during the Baroque and Classical period, we had 12 notes per octave but not equally spaced. It is like how 12 tone equal temperament was discovered here and in China in the 1500s, and maybe even earlier in China, but it took a long time to actually catch on widely here, so after open-ended meantone replaced Pythagorean in the late Renaissance/early Baroque, the well-tempered but not equal-tempered 12 note systems replaced open-ended meantone from the mid-Baroque though the mid-Romantic era.
On topic for this video, to get meantone or well-tempered tuning on viols and lutes/guitars/mandolins, split frets were often used, and the frets were (at least often) tied onto the necks of the instruments of the Renaissance and Baroque, so they could be moved.
have you released any music
@xavierbromius yeah, I have an old jazz album under my name, and a synth pop ep under “Levi & Bohdi”, but they sound so wildly different from what I do now, you’ll find little of what I do here in them. Hopefully I’ll have something released sometime this year
@@LeviMcClainheard of the album but haven't listened to the whole thing, looking forward to whatever you might have this year
@ yeah, that one was recorded at the end of highschool… and I had to play every instrument, so as you could probably tell, it was rough 😂
Does anyone know where I can find tastinos? I’ve been on google for an hour and I can’t seem to find them
Please try out my Yarman-24/31cc makam scales under Ableton Live 12. They are more intricately thought-out compared to basically taking multiples of 12-tET on the fretboard.
Ahhh, dont have Ableton! But it sounds intriguing
FRETLESS INSTRUMENTS JUST TOO CHILL FOR MORE FRETS prove me wrong
Have you seen what the psych rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is doing? Check out the Flying Microtonal Banana album.
I can already tell this is gonna be big, who else?
Can anybody help me? I get that he doesn't want to name a brand but where can I find them? (in Europe)
What’s wrong with just playing fretless instruments?
@@Plantids absolutely nothing! Most of my basses are fretless. Not everyone can afford them tho, so this is a cheap alternative that has the added bonus of not having to worry about intonation all the time (:
It's a completely different sound and feel. With frets, you can calculate pitches exactly, plus/minus a certain amount of inevitable error. With a fretless instrument (or instruments like trombones or swanee whistles), one can achieve good intonation with practice, and some people are just born with it, but there's always some uncertainty. Intonation doesn't have to be perfect to sound good (or right).
2:37 hmm… I don’t think I’ve seen the microtonal thing done before that actually sounded musical and not “off” in a modern western style that wasn’t TRYING to be dissonant (horror music). 🤔
@@Edbrad check out my video on Orwell 9 - it’s called “I broke music theory” there is a piece in the middle that I consider extremely not dissonant. Also! Check out JI stuff too (:
🧐🧐😲🏆🏆👍👍💯💯
Why don't Just go fretless?
@@ramonzeira totally could! If you have the time resources and money to either de - fret your instrument, or buy a fretless. This is just cheap, quick, and you don’t need to be focusing on intonation when you should be focusing on expression
Microtone... whats about bending...?
Microfrets won’t threaten your ability to bend 😅
@LeviMcClain ;-) I thought: Bending makes microfrets superfluous.... ;-)
@@HubertMessenger good luck with that one!
dude, you should tune your acoustic bass, sounded bad even with the microfrets.
@@JimBoom92 it’s in tune, adjust your ears my dude (:
Knock Knock
Who's there?
Are you a musician?
Yes, why?
Have you heard the good news about the quarter tone?
7:39 wow this slaps, literally. Maybe for a next video how to set up freets for an electric guitar?
kinda want to try them out on my electric bass but it doesn't fit at all with the music i play being sludge metal and grindcore lmao
If King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard can do it, so can you! I believe in you. 😊
@corinneconverse6070 thank you but not sure if heavy distortion and downtuning wouldn't ruin it