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:
“The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”
—Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
“Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 and if you think you’re tired of hearing about us, you should try being one of us.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“And this mighty master of the organ of language, who knew its every stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the thin silver tones of its slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence of its deepest thunder, who could make it sing like a flute or roar like a cataract, he was born into a country without literature.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–84)