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:
“When as the rye reach to the chin,
And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream,
And school-boys playing in the stream;”
—George Peele (15591596)
“The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930)
“Tis not that thy mien is stately,
Tis not that thy tones are soft;”
—Charles Stuart Calverley (18311884)
“Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at hateful ragtime no longer passes for musical culture.”
—Scott Joplin (18681917)
“I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)