How to Not Hate Microtonal Guitar
by Freddy Angelico
Any time we post about our microtonal guitars over on social media, we get comments saying things like:
We admit: the first time we heard microtonal guitar, we didn’t quite get it either! Our ears weren’t used to the sound, and we hadn’t had the chance to explore what it’s like to play a microtonal guitar. Then we heard a band called King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and were drawn to the catchy riffs and the far-out tones that sounded like nothing else out there.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
What makes this music sound the way it does? In the western tradition of music, octaves are divided up into twelve equal pieces, which we call half steps. On a guitar, you have access to each of these half steps with a fret—twelve of them before you get to the octave twelfth fret. Now imagine a fretless guitar. It turns out, there’s an infinite number of notes between the notes of the standard guitar frets, and they can provide all kinds of color and emotion.
Dweezil Zappa
In western music, the seventh note of the scale creates a feeling of tension. Our brains know that note is usually headed back to the first note of the scale, the tonic. What if you could increase that tension by making the note just a little bit higher in pitch? Or, conversely, what if you could relax that tension by playing the note a little flat? Fretless guitars allow you to make that choice for yourself.
Not everyone wants the full freedom of note choice (or the unique tone) of a fretless guitar. Some players still want the sound of a fretted guitar, but want consistent access to these specific colors and notes “between” the notes. That is where microtonal guitars come in. Check out the incredible music of Angine de Poitrine.
Angine de Poitrine
Guitarist Khn de Poitrine uses a microtonal guitar with a whopping 24 frets per octave, twice as many as a standard guitar. Using microtonality (and incredible technical ability) they create unforgettable, imaginative riffs that would never be possible on a standard guitar. And best of all, the songs are total earworms! This is hardly “out of tune,” or “weird.” Don’t believe us? Just check the comments.
Once our ears adjusted to the beauty and power of this music, we were hooked. We just had to make a microtonal model for ourselves. Craig Cook of King Gizzard occasionally plays a modified microtonal Hi-Flier guitar, which of course is one of our all-time favorite guitar designs. We knew it was the perfect platform for our very first microtonal model: the Hi-Flier MT.
The incredible Maddie Ashman with her Hi-Flier MT, which is also available left-handed
Of course, one can’t get too far down the King Gizzard rabbit hole before diving into their 2017 album Flying Microtonal Banana, which is a tour de force of psychedelic rock and microtonality. Since we already made a guitar called the SG2C Flying Banana, it wasn’t long before we decided to pay tribute with our own Flying Microtonal Banana: the SG2C Flying Banana MT.
Michael Weber playing an SG2C Flying Banana MT
Sometimes after playing the guitar for a while, you can get stuck in a rut. You’re playing the same licks over and over in your solos, and your riffs all start to sound the same. If you're in that spot, you need to check out microtonal guitars. They are not only guaranteed to shake up your sound, they may even lead to a total reshaping of your musical priorities. What once sounded “weird” now sounds interesting. What once was “out of tune” now rocks.
We know microtonal guitars are not for everyone, and that’s okay! But for folks who like to push boundaries, microtonality opens up a whole new world of musical exploration. The musicians in the videos above are on the front lines of this wave of popular microtonal music, and we love surfing the wave with them.