Re: [Harp-L] New website: Spiral Tuning

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Rick Dempster" wrote:

<Hmm...I listened to the sound samples; no inducements to try this tuning
<as far as my ears can stretch. Spiral appears to me to reduce the
<bending palette to semitones only, for one thing. Other than that I'd
<have to try one myself. There appears to be more than one tuning
<here,(ie minors, natural & harmonic) but I don't hear anything that is
<remarkably different from anything that come be done on  any of the easy
<to get over-the-counter tunings. 

I heard James Conway do some pretty amazing things with a spiral-tuned harp at his SPAH performance, which by the way was thrilling in the old school way--a bunch of great musicians playing great music with a lot of power and care. I could have listened for hours more.  But I digress.

Anyway, the advantage of a spiral tuning, as with any nonstandard tuning, is that you get an entirely different set of chords. If all you play are single notes, then almost any tuning will do (if you can bend and overblow easily), and it might as well be standard. But the chords you can play are the ones that are built into the tuning, and the chords on many nonstandard tunings are a lot more interesting and enjoyable to hear than the ones on a standard harp (which are really pretty dull when you come down to it--mostly a lot of variations on two chords). Conway got a lot of mileage out of those chords.

Regards, Richard Hunter