| Interesting. I wasn’t endorsing them, I was just saying they exist. I wasn’t really aware of these differences, I don’t know much about TT and haven’t really read any of their marketing. I was just going from the idea that each fretted note has a compensated scale length, so each note is intonated individually, like a piano. I couldn’t find a good source that explains the differences. Can you point me in the right direction or give a quick summary? I believe on a piano each key is intonated to sound about the same as any other key, but I know that in the studio and for some concerts, pianos can be tuned to sweeten whatever keys are going to be featured. There’s nothing stopping the TT company from redesigning the frets to match the intonation of a piano, right? It’s a choice to sweeten some keys, and obviously you can’t sweeten one without souring another. Hopefully it’s obvious to anyone buying it that TT is designed for standard tuning. If you’re buying one of these you probably have multiple guitars so it’s not really a big deal that this one is limited to standard. I have several guitars and rarely change tunings on them, unless maybe going to drop D on a hard tail sometimes. The technique problem isn’t huge: good guitarists don’t regularly death grip their notes or strike the strings too hard unless they’re doing it intentionally. Also neither is the tuning stability problem. In the studio you’ll retune as needed. Not many people play these on stage because if you’re the only one with TT in a rock band context you’ll sound off compared to everyone else. I don’t really care either way, because my technique is horrible and I suck. Also imperfect intonation doesn’t really bother me, I barely notice it. |
I don't know that's it's obvious standard would matter, if it was actually 12TET, I would expect shifting up/down to be fine. And, really, it should still be, and I think would give you different just intonated keys if you do, and you shouldn't even need to re-intonate since you didn't move the octave. I think it's just that they don't tell you the offsets you need easily if you do this.
I don't think TT can get much closer to 12TET than a normal, well intonated guitar, even if they explicitly went for 12TET. I'm not certain, but my intuition is that given the placement of the octave (12th fret) is literally the halfway point and you can already adjust intonation, beyond that equal temperament should just be placing the frets on a log scale inbetween, which should look normal - no squiggle required.
IIRC, On a piano, the complexity of intonation is because you don't have harmonics so much as partials - the way they work, you don't get perfect harmonics, a string with a 100Hz fundamental won't necessarily have harmonics at 200Hz, 300Hz, etc. it 'll be peaks at different multiplies, and IIRC not spaced consistently even between partials. This makes it so you may want to tune so the partials are pleasant sounding even if it makes the fundamental off a bit. Mostly reciting things from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKVuo-87l8 from memory here, you might give it a watch.
Tuning can be a problem even in the studio if your guitar is a pain to tune. I have a 7 string floyd that legitimately takes about half an hour to get right every time, but the stability is great such that (assuming little temp variance) it'll stay in tune for months.
As for sucking, sucking is the first step to not sucking. Also, if you though enough ambient and distortion pedals at it, even suck can sound ethereal ;)