Jim Hanks
Well-known member
This could go under Links, but I thought I'd put it here for general discussion. I have this Ohana tenor that doesn't get played much so I figured I'd try something different with it - Eb Cuatro tuning. This is accomplished with Southcoast's Extra Light Linear set with the optional cuatro first string. (Aside: The restringing went fine although the 4th string is really sitting on top of its slot. I ought to file it a bit to make it sit down in the slot but I'm not sure yet if I'll keep it this way long term. It plays fine this way, just a tad higher action than it should be. Intonation is surprisingly not really an issue. But I digress.)
Here's my first quick-n-dirty attempt:
https://soundcloud.com/jim-hanks/ukulele-cuatro-tuning-test
To summarize the details, there are 3 sections:
1. reentrant Bb
2. cuatro Eb with same fingerings as #1
3. cuatro Eb with same chords (almost) as #1
I find it interesting that both the cuatro samples sound relatively *higher* than the reentrant sample. This is counter-intuitive to me since the overall pitches of the strings are lower even though the overall range is the same. It's also explainable in that the key of #1 is lower relative to #2 (Gm vs Cm) and the position of #1 is lower relative to #3 (e.g 2000 vs 4432 for the first chord).
I don't know what I'm going to do with this yet. It is definitely different. Picking common patterns gives a very different feel than either normal reentrant or linear. Chording also gives a different feel - "tighter" - but less so.
There are some other threads on cuatro tuning but none recently.
What do you think? Anybody else liking cuatro tuning? How do you use it differently than "high reentrant" or linear tuning?
Here's my first quick-n-dirty attempt:
https://soundcloud.com/jim-hanks/ukulele-cuatro-tuning-test
To summarize the details, there are 3 sections:
1. reentrant Bb
2. cuatro Eb with same fingerings as #1
3. cuatro Eb with same chords (almost) as #1
I find it interesting that both the cuatro samples sound relatively *higher* than the reentrant sample. This is counter-intuitive to me since the overall pitches of the strings are lower even though the overall range is the same. It's also explainable in that the key of #1 is lower relative to #2 (Gm vs Cm) and the position of #1 is lower relative to #3 (e.g 2000 vs 4432 for the first chord).
I don't know what I'm going to do with this yet. It is definitely different. Picking common patterns gives a very different feel than either normal reentrant or linear. Chording also gives a different feel - "tighter" - but less so.
There are some other threads on cuatro tuning but none recently.
What do you think? Anybody else liking cuatro tuning? How do you use it differently than "high reentrant" or linear tuning?