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:
“Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel
Mam, we’re playing funerals now.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The oft-repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters in every quarter of the Old World, and but today, perchance, a new coin is dug up whose inscription repeats and confirms their fame. Some “Judæa Capta,” with a woman mourning under a palm tree, with silent argument and demonstration confirms the pages of history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“‘Tis not that thy mien is stately,
‘Tis not that thy tones are soft;”
—Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884)
“Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”
—William Pitt, The Elder, Lord Chatham (1708–1778)