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synestematic / kord

a music theory development framework in python
MIT License
380 stars 13 forks source link

pedal steel #4

Closed abgordon closed 3 years ago

abgordon commented 3 years ago

This would be great for pedal steel. Not only is a standard E9 pedal steel complicated enough with 10 strings, the addition of the pedals means many alternate tunings are available which is extremely intimidating for most people. Basically the addition of a pedal changes the intervals and gives you a different tuning, meaning different phrasings of chords instantly become available. Thing is, it's a lot to keep track of. I would love to play around with this to increase my knowledge of what chords become available when you depress certain pedals / knee levers

I think if you had a pedal steel instrument option, you could encapsulate the notion of a pedal down as a tuning option. For a few small examples, the 3 most widely used pedals do the following:

Foot 1: raise the 10th + 5th strings up a step, moving in an open E chord configuration the 5th to the 6th Foot 2: raise the 8th + 3rd strings up a step, moving in an open E chord configuration the 4th to the 5th Foot 3: raise the 4th + 5th strings up a step, moving in an open E chord configuration the root to a 2nd, 5th to a 6th

Frequently they are depressed together, ie pedal 1 + 2 is a 4th chord relative to root if you play strings 3-6, 8 and 10, 2+3 is a minor 2, etc etc

And there's 2 left and 2 right knee pedals, and you can only do 1 at the same time. But still the max combinations is 5! I think for the option of having 5 total pedals, and the permutation of all the pedals you could trigger at one time which is no good (pedal 1 alone, pedal 1 and 2, pedal 1 2 and 3, pedal 1 and 3, pedal 1 and 3 left knee left, pedal 1 and 3 left knee right....etc etc) for a total of 120.

So maybe the "tuning" approach is no good. At minimum, I would want:

pedal 1 pedal 2 pedal 3 LKL LKL + pedal 1 LKL + pedal 2 LKR LKR + pedal 1 LKR + pedal 2

... likewise for the right pedals, add 6 more...

pedals 1 + 2 pedals 2 + 3

That's 17 already. Maybe there's a more clever way to do this

synestematic commented 3 years ago

Hi, I have been doing some research and unfortunately I'm going to have to tell you that support for this instrument will not be added. The pedal steel guitar's tuning mechanism is not only quite complex but I also believe that the freboard application would provide limited usefulness in navigating its fretboard. Luckily your request still allowed me to catch a bug I had missed with instruments that have more than 9 strings, so thanks for that.