1-3-7-21-49-147

Just hit play.



Yes, friends, that is my new favorite guitar tuning. It is (if you're into this) an E (maybe), a third harmonic above that, a seventh harmonic of the E, a seventh harmonic of the third harmonic, a seventh harmonic of the seventh harmonic, a third harmonic of the seventh harmonic of the seventh harmonic (bringing us to 3x7x7 = 147).

In short, it's the greatest tuning ever created. I tried to pluck a tune normal guitar style, but it just wasn't doing the tuning justice, so I cradled the guitar between my legs like a cello, put my recorder in front of myself, picked up my violin bow, and started making noise. What you hear (as we speak, if you followed instructions) is an excerpt, after I got used to the mechanics of it, but before I started to run out of ideas. You'll notice it's mostly 5 minutes of drones; they aren't all drones, but when you vibrate the higher strings at 21 and 49 and 147 times the speed of the lower strings, their vibrations are so perfectly in tune with the natural vibrations of the lower strings that the whole thing starts to reverberate. All this really needs is to be even louder, and sustained for upwards of an hour.

Anyway, the last one (taeper, or repeat backwards) was also on guitar, but with a different tuning (1-4/3-7/4-9/4-11/4-4/1), and just the same thirteen (yes, prime numbers) notes, looped and played backward. There's a bandpass on the whole thing, so nothing changes except for the reinforced frequencies--the shift in melody that you hear is actually just a shift in filtration, like holding differently colored gels in front of a white light.