User:Andrewa/Ten string tunings

This is a page for documenting tunings for the ten-string extended-range classical guitar and its derivatives. Lute tunings may also be described here if relevant, but the primary focus is on the ten-string guitar.

Anyone is welcome to edit this page. (Or any other page in Wikipedia if it improves the encyclopedia. I hope people might visit this page who aren't yet Wikipedia contributors, so I thought I'd point that out.) You don't need to sign on. Just be bold and hit the Edit this page link above.

This page will of necessity dabble in original research, but that's just a means to an encyclopedic end. Of course that material won't go directly into any article. But the first step to getting accurate, verifiable material is often just to get it accurate. That's the primary goal here. A secondary, but still important, goal is then to find reliable secondary sources to verify this information. It's secondary only because we might do it here, or we might do it in the article talk pages. But we must do it, because only then does it go into the relevant article(s).

Any stuff which I'm confident is accurate but which can't be verified to Wikipedia's standards may well end up in Unimpedia or some other webspace. There's even a prototype at The Online Encyclopedia of Tunings.

Conventions

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Stringed instrument tunings) for the primary jumping-off point. But there are differences:

Here we use Bb and F# instead of B♭ or F♯, in defiance of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (music)#Accidentals. It's just that they're so much easier to type. (You can use the proper symbols if you really want to, but you don't need to. What we're after here is just info, not style.)
Here we use a modified form of Helmholtz notation, as in we just use a single quote ' instead of either the prime or sub-prime symbols. This is unambiguous; For example a' is the octave above a, A' is the octave below A, and A' ' is the octave below A', etc.. Again, this is just easier to type. (And again, if it makes you happy, use the full Helmholtz thing as you see fit.)
These two shorthands mean there are a couple of places we need to put in an extra blank:
- Between two notes, there's always a blank. This is only really important when the second note is b, but in that case, does Ab for example mean two notes, an A followed by the B a ninth above it, or one A-flat note? But put the blank there all the time for consistency.
- Between two ' symbols, there's a blank. Otherwise the wiki software swallows them both and puts you into or out of italics. Actually, this is a problem with straight Helmholtz too.

Example showing much of the above, and just to get our bearings: Middle C is c', and the note a semitone above it is c#'.

Tunings

See http://tunings.pbwiki.com/Ten-string-guitar for material formerly here.

Feel free to add new material or corrections either here or there.

External links

10-string guitar Yahoo Group, open archive and membership.
- Tuning for Bach Lute Suite on the 10-string guitar, as used by Stephan Schmidt for his recording of Bach's lute music.
- Stephen Bright talks about Decacorde, Theorbo and Dm tunings.
- Jouni talks about Romantic and Baroque scordaturas.
Tunings for the Ten-String Guitar at one of Janet Marlow's websites.