Playing Quarter Tones On Musical Instruments
Because many musical instruments manufactured today are designed for the 12-tone scale, not all are usable for playing quarter tones. Sometimes special playing techniques must be used.
Conventional musical instruments that cannot play quarter tones (except by using special techniques—see below) include
- Normally fretted string instruments
- Pianos, normally tuned
- Organs, when conventionally tuned
- Synthesizers (when design does not permit)
- Accordions
- Pitched percussion instruments, when tuning does not permit and normal techniques are used
Conventional musical instruments that can play quarter tones include
- Synthesizers (if design permits)
- Fretless string instruments (on fretted string instruments it is possible with bending or special tuning)
- Quarter-tone fretted string instruments
- Slide brass instruments (trombone)
- Valved brass instruments (trumpet, horn, tuba)
- Woodwind instruments, using special fingering or bending.
- Flute
- Recorder
- Clarinet
- Oboe
- Saxophone
- Bassoon
- Harmonica
- Harp
- Pianos, if specially tuned
- Organs, when tuned for the purpose
- Pitched percussion instruments, when tuning permits, or using special techniques
Experimental instruments have been built to play in quarter tones, for example a quarter tone clarinet by Fritz Schüller (1883–1977) of Markneukirchen.
Other instruments can be used to play quarter tones when using audio signal processing effects such as pitch shifting.
Pairs of conventional instruments tuned a quarter tone apart can be used to play some quarter tone music. Indeed, quarter-tone pianos have been built, which consist essentially of two pianos stacked one above the other in a single case, one tuned a quarter tone higher than the other.
Read more about this topic: Quarter Tone
Famous quotes containing the words playing, quarter, tones, musical and/or instruments:
“If, during his daily walk, he met any children flying kites, playing marbles, or whirling peg tops, he would buy the toys from them and exhort them not to gamble or indulge in vain sport.”
—For the State of Rhode Island, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, as sand eddies in a whirlwind.”
—Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
“Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at “hateful ragtime” no longer passes for musical culture.”
—Scott Joplin (1868–1917)
“Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)