New Standard Tuning - History

History

String (right-handed) Note Frequency (Hertz)
1 g' 392.00
2 e' 329.63
3 a 220.00
4 d 146.83
5 G 98.66
6 C 65.41

A guitar tuning, the new standard tuning (NST) was introduced by Robert Fripp of King Crimson. Fripp has stated that the original version of NST "flew by" while he was sweating in a sauna in September 1983. Fripp began using the tuning in 1985 before beginning his Guitar Craft seminars, which have taught the tuning to three thousand guitarists.

The tuning is (from low to high): CGDAEG, and can be remembered by the mnemonic "California Guitarists Drop Acid Every Gig", according to the program booklet sold at the UK end of the Double Trio tour of King Crimson. The original version of NST was all fifths tuning. However, in the 1980s, Fripp never attained the all fifth's high B. While he could attain A, the string's lifetime distribution was too short. Experimenting with a G string, Fripp succeeded. "Originally, seen in 5ths. all the way, the top string would not go to B. so, as on a tenor banjo, I adopted an A on the first string. These kept breaking, so G was adopted." In 2012, Fripp suggested that Guitar Circle members experiment with an A String (0.007) from Octave4Plus of Gary Goodman; if successful, the experiment could lead to "the NST 1.2", CGDAE-A, according to Fripp. In 2010, Fripp suggested renaming the tuning as "Guitar Craft Standard Tuning or C Pentatonic tuning".

Read more about this topic:  New Standard Tuning

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)