h a l f b a k e r yQuis custodiet the custard?
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A Trumpet Marine is a stringed instrument with one very long thick string. The string is bowed, and tunes are played by touching the string at harmonic nodes.
The Electric Guitar Marine has one long single string. Instead of touching the string to force certain harmonics to sound, the string is allowed
to vibrate open, but the pickups are arranged along the length of the string, positioned carefully so that some are at nodes and some are at antinodes. A pickup at a node will not get any sound, whereas a pickup at an antinode will get the full sound of that harmonic.
Pickups are switched in or out of action using a kind of keyboard, either electrically by switching their output into or out of the mix, or mechanically, by swinging the pickup closer to or further from penguin the string.
The string could be actuated by a mechanical bow (like a hurdy gurdy), or by electric induction, or by plucking with the fingers.
I wonder if it would be possible to have inducers alongside the pickups, allowing different harmonic vibrations to be induced in the string?
Trumpet Marine
http://www.trombama...ments/tromba-marina
[pocmloc, Oct 16 2012]
[link]
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A string of fixed length has one fundamental
frequency and the harmonics of that
frequency. |
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Unless you vary either the tension, length or
thickness of the string in some way, it will
only even produce one resonance, no matter
how you drive it. |
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You play the tune on //the harmonics of that frequency//. |
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Not for rocking the casbah then? |
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//one fundamental frequency and the harmonics of
that frequency. // |
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BUT the harmonics are not all octaves. Thus, several
distinct notes can be played. |
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guitarists get harmonics through some special technique. |
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Unless you touch the string at some point, regardless of where you pick or bow it, you'll still get its primary tone regardless at every pickup, regardless of where they're placed. |
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You can get rather cool effects by picking or bowing anywhere from the halfway poing on the string (where the double dots are on most guitar fretboards), which give a very overtone free sound, to very close to the bridge, which gives a very overtone-rich sound. You can switch pickups on a normal electric guitar, and get a similar effect (that's why there's a switch on most of 'em for that), but it doesn't change the primary tone. |
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But two pickups in different places, some harmonics will be in phase and some out, right? You could combine their outputs. |
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// the equivalent of a stringed bagpipe // |
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so you can rip harmonics out of a guitar... there's
46
that I've been able to force.... 2nd,3rd,4th,5th,7th
frets and 12th for the octave. You need a lot of
overdrive-based compression... anything apart
from 5,7&12 are pretty quiet. |
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However, what's key here is that to catch them
you pluck the string, then touch the string over
one of those points. Your finger damps the
vibrations at that point, creating a node, you can
actually see the string vibrating as a whole, then
when you touch at the 12th fret, you can see the
node form and the string develops 2 separate
visible waveforms (it helps a lot to be under strobe
lighting at this point ;-)). Which is why the note
shifts up in pitch by an octave.... if you touch at
5th, you see a greater number of nodes/anti
nodes form. Simply placing pickups in different
places won't catch this phenomenon, it has to be
created. As people have pointed out, electric
guitars frequently have different pickup
placements, but this doesn't change the note, just
the timbre. |
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But strongly changing the timbre in a stepwise manner does give a strong *impression* of different pitches; and is even better than damped harmonics, in some ways, as you hear the stronger harmonic against the background of the others, creating a very cool effect that is neither one pitch nor many, but somewhere in between. Throat singing and Jew's harp are examples of this effect. |
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I've considered building a long electric monochord (or oligochord), to be played like a tromba marina, or with a slide (like a slightly glorified diddley bow). I hadn't thought about using many pickups. The effect might be relatively subtle, but I'd very much like to have a go on your idea [+]. |
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(sp. one very long _thin_ string. The string has to be thin in proportional to its length to get the higher harmonics) |
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