Gallery of Microtonal Guitars |
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Jon Catler really shows his genius at designing fretting systems here. I calculated the measurements and fretted it. Every note plays perfectly in tune in several different keys. More about this instrument.
LEGAL NOTE:
Ian Gorman from Austrlia has a US patent #5,760,322 Guitar with deviations to straight fret architecture suggesting that he discovered bent frets in 1996. I was unaware of this when I built this guitar. These pictures and text are provided for educational purposes only. This instrument and ones like it are not for sale. Anyone wishing to purchase or sell instruments with bent frets should contact Ian Gorman.
This is Jon Catler's 12-Tone Plus neck design. It maintains the traditional 12 tone equal tempered frets but adds extra frets which yield a true dominant seventh, a neutral third, and several other intervals.
This is a sixth-tone guitar neck. It has 2 frets between each of the original frets. The intervals between the frets are 33.3 cents. It sounds great with tone rows because almost every note is dissonant with every other note. More about this instrument.
This is an experimental tuning system that provides some very interesting intervals. The frets represent Just Intonation intervals so each string acts like a tonic of it's own scale. Tuning the strings differently yields a variety of tone palettes.
Find out more about microtones in the Tuning section.
Drew Skyfire has arranged a list of microtonal guitarist links which is so good, that it would be pointless to reproduce any of them here.