Just Intonation Disco

i'll second sexyDancer: this cd suxxx and ain't worth your $$$.

Branca's Symphony No 6 also has an active 4/4 beat in parts, but a muffled, distant one.

Rhys Chatham has a number of uptempo danceable pieces, "Guitar Trio" and "Drastic Classicism" but the drums are closer to punk than disco.

Most of the time adding a beat completely destroys the trance, it's a tricky thing to do.

I agree with SexyDancer & hstencil, the La Monte Young 2 CD blues record isn't that great. Young's using a pretty silly digital piano sound, the tuning is there but things never quite take off.

Alright, thanks for the warning. I wasn't going to spend that kind of dinero for it anyway, but if I happen to find a cheap copy somewhere (or online) I might give it a listen.

I'd probably pay for it if he bothered to press an actual copy.

i've played this pitched-up in dj sets multiple times.

not just-intonation, but that funky track on "church of anthrax" is a fun one, too.

My DVD player (& definitely my powerbook) often has problems with burns is all -- "actual copy" means one I know will play on all systems, so I lose a bit

This isn't about disco (necessarily), but this seemed like the appropriate thread in which to ask this question: Why do we need equal temperament in electronic music that doesn't modulate keys and stays within a very small chordal structure? I'd wager that a lot of the music that makes the pop charts these days is actually being dragged down by 12TET. I understand equal temperament when you're doing crazy jazz chord substitutions or when you've got an instrument that is designed to operate within equal temperament (e.g. a guitar), but a lot of music nowadays is made purely digitally and with just a little more effort producers could be making their tonal pop songs that much more perfectly tonal by justly tuning their notes.

i "need" five grand and a mountain of psilocybin mushrooms
― Special Agent Dale Koopa (orion), Thursday, October 27, 2005 12:08 PM (7 years ago)

totally agree.

just intonation can sound a bit boring and flat though. i think experimentation in the spectral domain, matching and bending/blending/morphing harmonic/overtone content is far more interesting, especially in things which have a strange harmonic make-up. see the book 'tuning, timbre, spectral, scale' (pm me if you can't find a copy and i'll fire one over)

lots of electronic/synth music adheres to pure ratio intervals anyway, it's difficult *not* go for the purer intervals when you're tuning oscillators by hand, the same way your voice drifts towards harmonically "pure" intervals when singing in a choir. anyone whose tried to write phat bass lines has prob encountered some of the rubbish things 12TET tuning does

when it comes to programming, things get a bit tricky, i've made max and reaktor patches that send out pitch bend data and you can define ratios according to a number of root notes, but eh, i dunno, i don't find stict JI to be a particularly expressive tuning system to work in

the xenharmonic community is pretty active if you want to dive further into this stuff, you might recognise quite a few names from the experimental electronic community too :)

http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/

and here's a piece that uses microtones that i'd totally play at a disco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OjIgFTtjD0

henry flynt's "no rights". the fiddle is probably just, everything else probably isn't. you can shake your butt to it.
why people be so uptight über diese unterschiedliche tunings n that? sounds good or it doesn't people are either too lazy to retune / refret their instruments or dogmatic slaves to pythagorean / just / whatever.

obviously the xenharmonic wiki is my favorite site

Really like that Berberian track!

because from different tunings you can derive new and interesting scales, you can find pitch ratios that you really like! there are loads of established scales to explore etc

not that relevant to thread but w/e some of these pieces are incredible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62yVU1pspQ