UST/Luna - Worthless now!

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by AsianStew, May 14, 2022.

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  1. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    If you are interested, do a YouTube search and you'll find videos by various guitarists of every type demonstrating one or another meantone tunings. A word of warning, though, from a harpsichord builder in New Zealand (and many others) to performers, "Once you become accustomed to the pure major thirds of meantone, you might not be satisfied with anything else in the way of temperament."
     
  2. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Although, as you know, I'm no purist, musically or in most other areas, I'm very interested to hear these guitarists on Youtube. I'll check the topic out.

    Myself, I'm most often a string-bender and slider when it comes to guitar - but I do get around to music where that's not required. And I do thank you, nosborne, for expanding my horizons. It seems there are a thousand or more ways to play guitar - and I'll never be able to say I've seen them all.

    Valuable information - thanks again.
     
  3. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Um. Whatever you normally call it when someone promises something that they may not be able to deliver. But that has as much to do with how Bitcoin works as Bernie Madoff's investment scheme had to how the U.S. dollar works.
     
  4. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

  5. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    There's no configuration of tuning or fingerboard that sounds particularly good when I play it. :) I get what I get. I doubt if I'll ever get a meantone guitar - or any other guitar built for me again.

    It was a two-year nightmare in the pandemic, getting my Fender Telecaster (Partscaster) together. Store lockdowns were one thing - at one point we were the only jurisdiction in North America to have a retail lockdown - and it was complete and lasted months - except for essentials like food. Even Walmart and the Dollar Stores had to cover their "non-essentials." I couldn't even get underwear or socks, let alone Fender guitar parts. Or even a birthday card for my grandson. (I got around that at a convenience store. They sell what they have - no restriction.) The guy who made the guitar body cut the neck pocket too shallow, and was supposed to redo it. Never did. Neither my tech guru nor anyone else could find me someone in town to do it. Where my tech guy works just doesn't have the equipment. Finally my son and another teacher did it for me, on a new CNC machine at school. Perfect job.

    Minor hitch, when some crooks who've been running a music store (as a front?) for 50 years sold me a pair of used vintage pickups. My tech guy, who's really good, installed them and one was a dud. So I was over-budget $200. $50 I paid for the useless one and $150 (Cdn.) for a Seymour Duncan "Hot Rails" humbucker that was made for the bridge position. More than worth it. Awesome. I'm happy - and the Tele cost me over $1000 Cdn. less than a US Pro model and the neck is the same. I got it from Fender US. The body is custom - Canadian Black walnut. There hasn't been a walnut Tele since the 80s when a few came out of Fender's Custom Shop. One of those, used, sells around here for $6K - $7K. My guitar cost around $1,300 all-in, including both the extra expenses.

    Will I ever do this again? Probably not. Certainly not during a pandemic - and I firmly believe there will be more. I have eight guitars and love them all. And eight was my own set limit. Nah. I'll move - and my next extravagance will be all about my sewing room. I'm serious. I'm still as fascinated as I was when I first opened the books for the fashion design course. Who knew?
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2022
  6. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    Since you are a rock guitarist, Johann, you might not know that the way you treat thirds, fifths and cadences is remarkably similar to the way medieval composers did. The reason is simple. They tuned by Pythagorean fifths. You tune in equal temperament which is very close to Pythagorean. Your fifths sound good like theirs did. Your thirds sound grisly and out of tune almost as badly as theirs did. You know your "power chord"? In 1450, composers called the exact same thing a "trine".
     
  7. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    Okay, SF, let me ask you this. Do you disagree that banking activities such as accepting deposits and making loans creates and destroys money?
     
  8. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    I did take macro, and I understand why it's described that way in a system that's designed around fractional reserve banking. But since one of the things we're seeing now is that trying to emulate that with Bitcoin is risky at best, I wouldn't use the same description, especially since predetermined money supply is (for better or worse) one of its signature features.
     
  9. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    Excellent. I felt sure you did understand. Well, that "signature feature" of Bitcoin is misleading at best because in that deliberately unregulated environment people are setting up crypto banks like Celsius that take deposits and make loans. That creates and destroys the currency they are taking in and loaning out.

    I agree with you that actual tokens are fixed but the tokens represent only a fraction of the total bitcoin currency that's out there. Celsius seems to have been lending based on fractional reserves, itself not a bad thing, but when the depositors come demanding their tokens back, Celsius had to suspend withdrawals. There being no lender of last resort, those depositors will lose their money.

    The Bitcoin model is unstable and financially dangerous. When its market cap reached the trillions of USD it became a potential systemic threat.

    That's why I am a "hater".
     
  10. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    For one thing, the crypto industry is regulated by FinCEN, among other agencies. For another, things like Celsius are not the Bitcoin model, since not only is that not a function of Bitcoin itself, but we're seeing that Bitcoin doesn't lend itself to that use (as it were). It's also somewhat ironic, since many early adopters of Bitcoin were attracted to it in part from ideological opposition to fractional reserve banking.
     
  11. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    What regulation keeps crypto banks from accepting Bitcoin deposits and making Bitcoin loans?
     
  12. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    But that's not where the goalposts were. You referred to a "deliberately unregulated environment", and now seem to be suggesting that the only alternative to that description is one in which regulations entirely prohibit a particular activity rather than one permitting it within certain parameters.

    As the closest example I can think of offhand, because of those parameters and changes to them, in February BlockFi stopped allowing US-based clients to add value to interest-bearing Bitcoin-denominated accounts. However, the activity is not prohibited, as those clients can maintain the account values they already had at that time which continue to attract interest, and their policy change did not apply to non-US clients. (Although, after recent events we'll see whether the regulatory environment becomes tighter.)
     
  13. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    Alright but if there are interest bearing bitcoin accounts, doesn't it follow necessarily that loans in Bitcoin are being made?
     
  14. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    That's certainly reasonable sounding, unless they have some other revenue model that's based on holding other people's assets.
     
  15. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Dunno yet, about those thirds, Nosborne. Think maybe I'll try a Howlin' Wolf song -- use the Wolf Fifth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_interval

    "In music theory, the wolf fifth (sometimes also called Procrustean fifth, or imperfect fifth) is a particularly dissonant musical interval spanning seven semitones. Strictly, the term refers to an interval produced by a specific tuning system, widely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the quarter-comma meantone temperament."



    Yeah, Smokestack Lightnin,' that's more my kinda thing... :) Man's got a real mean tone!
     
    Last edited: Jul 6, 2022
  16. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    That meantone fifth, actually a diminished sixth it says here, isn't really the problem Bach thought it was. He just wanted to play in any key he chose. He never gave any explanation for that and much (most?) of his music does fine in meantone. It had to. The church organs he composed for and performed on were commonly meantone.

    No, to my ears the larger problem is keys that are misspelled because of the lack of enharmonics. Meantone is a kind of equal temperament itself so long as you don't try to treat an A# as a Bb. Well, almost all of the "black note" keys do this. The sole exception is Bb major.

    So in meantone you get nine "good" keys, six major and three minor. Everything else is supposedly unplayable. Well, composers did occasionally dip into the forbidden zone for "color" but not that often and not for long. I am working on a sonatina that sounds great everywhere except for about five bars where the composer elbows his way into c minor. It ain't pretty.
     
    Last edited: Jul 6, 2022
  17. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    I don't even think six "good" major keys is all that restricting. Just three "good" minor keys, however, could be inconvenient I rather suspect.
     
  18. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    There are people in blues who made careers in ONE "good" key. I don't think John Lee Hooker ever got out of E major - the "go-to" key for open-string guitar blues. He didn't need to, especially with that magnificent, dramatic voice. Lightnin' Hopkins, IIRC relied almost exclusively on three keys. E major, A major and only once or twice I heard him play in C major. That was for tunes he didn't write - a couple of ragtime-influenced songs, not straight blues, like "Take me Back."

    Back in the day, blues were, at first, the province of guitar players who could get great expression from limited technique, e.g. Tommy McClennan. They had a natural thing, which I maintain, can't be learned, beyond a certain point. "You either got it or you ain't." Between the wars, this changed. People like Tommy Johnson in Mississippi, Blind Lemon Jefferson in Texas, and Frank Stokes in Memphis, knew more music, and played in more ornate and harmonically - developed styles.

    Then the advent of electric guitar changed everything. Leading up to - and after WW2 - you get jazz-influences - e.g. T-Bone Walker (who played in Les Hite's big-band before his solo career) and B.B. King. B.B. acknowledged many influences on his music, including one of my faves, the Belgian-born Gypsy jazz artist, Django Reinhardt. B.B. King learned to read music, for his own reasons. Not for playing, but to be able to write band arrangements -saving the cost of paying for them.

    There have been some very adept blues players who have taught music at the University level - e.g. Fenton Robinson ("Somebody Loan me a Dime.")

    I'll never get to he bottom of it. Blues is a tremendous field. :)
     
    Last edited: Jul 6, 2022
    nosborne48 likes this.
  19. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Getting back to those old techniques, blues artists in more modern times have re-introduced them, with great results. Performers such as Keb' Mo' (Kevin Moore) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keb%27_Mo%27 and Taj Mahal (Claire Fredericks Jr.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal_(musician) have had great careers using a lot of traditional musicianship. They're older now - Taj will be 80 this year and Keb' Mo' will be 71. Enjoy them today - and they've already established a great legacy.

    I recently saw a younger performer who displayed some amazing 'bedrock' traditional country blues chops - on an electric. That was Cedric Burnside - grandson of the late, famed R.L. Burnside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Burnside Cedric's 41, I believe. Fine singer, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedric_Burnside
     
    nosborne48 likes this.
  20. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    Interesting stuff!
     

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