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Trio for guitar, bass guitar, and microtonal keyboard - 2nd mv.


Nick Vuci

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Here's the second movement for my first microtonal trio for guitar, bass guitar, and keyboard tuned to the 32-note Harmonic Series scale. Please leave comments, criticisms, feedback, as even Monarcheon's feedback on the first movement helped a lot. Hope you enjoy it!

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I think the microtonalism works best in any sort of chromatic figure, be it in modulation, leading into a note, or otherwise. Otherwise I think to most people it would sound like a wrong note, since they don't harmoniously fit into the general tonality of the piece. If, maybe, you started the piece with the intervals augmented by a microtone, then maybe it would sound a bit more appropriate? I'm not entirely sure.

Generally speaking, there's a lot of waiting time in this piece... time before more things happen. In such a relaxed mood as this, it doesn't really serve to be suspenseful, so it always seemed like a sentence with too many commas for me. 

Cheers.

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I really enjoyed this.

I suppose the keyboard is microtonal but the guitar and the bass don't.¿? I haven't heard many microtonal things (some workks by Ives is what I know best). Sometimes this piece sound like dissonances "against" other tonal lines. I mean, if all the instruments were microtonal... would it be different? Well, if they are then I know even less about this.

Anyway, the result is beautiful.

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Thank you all for your comments.

@Monarcheon I don't know if making the intervals augmented would help, but I'll certainly play around with the idea. I wasn't trying to create much suspense, but rather a relaxing sound. Thank you once again for your very valuable feedback. 

@Luis Hernández I'm glad you enjoyed it! Yes the guitar and bass are not microtonal, only the keyboard is a retuned midi controller. If they were all tuned to a 32-note scale it would still have the dissonances mentioned as that's how it was written. In fact it would likely sound more "dissonant" because the intervals would be "just" and most people used to 12-TET consider just intervals to sound a bit off (when in fact it's the 12-TET approximations that are detuned).

I hope you both check out the third (final) movement of this trio, I'm posting it now. :)

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