Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
> How did people figure out the positions of the frets without calculators and precision measuring instruments?
If you had perfect pitch (maybe relative pitch is enough) then couldn't you just make marks in each position on the fretboard where it sounds like a new full note, and then go back and listen for the half-notes and do the same thing?
Take a guitar. Very gently put finger on string. Start sliding finger while continuously strumming with other hand. On some places (usually 3rd 5th 12th fret) the string will produce clean sounds, that's where the frets should be.
I threw together a logarithmic slider for HTML (when I knew little about JavaScript and HTML). I hoped someone would take it and run with it and we would see more logarithmic slide rule calculators on the web.
Enable JavaScript and let the site issue a “not an AI” cookie and it should then be usable. (I have a JS button for this on my toolbar and it’s come in handy a lot recently..)
That just reminded ne of something from here I had completely forgotten about. Someone had posted making sort of dubious claim of guitar power chords being Turing complete. I made some small improvements (as I saw it, chiefly around how they had implemented their clock) to the code they posted
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294766
which lead me down a rabbit hole of guitar tab as opcodes, which eventually lead to something useful after throwing away the silly guitar virtual machine, since I had now done the work of implementing far more than the simple tablature parsing code I intended. That project that resulted from the silly toying around with tab notation as machine code lead to a midi-to-tab generator, which lead to audio to midi to tab, and a bunch more.
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe
There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.
Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
If you had perfect pitch (maybe relative pitch is enough) then couldn't you just make marks in each position on the fretboard where it sounds like a new full note, and then go back and listen for the half-notes and do the same thing?
(Top, yellow slider, cannot be interacted with):
https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html
Sources (such as they are):
https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SlideRule
Discussed about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356314 (196 comments)
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.