> We now use the so called equal temperament system...
Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak.
Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gut frets, but it's there.
I still think its fair to say we use the equal temperment system. It is a widely accepted standard. You're right, fret pressure alone can absolutely raise the pitch 5/10 cents, my Gibson SG has some deep frets and can do double that.
I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation or challenges A 440. Musical / mathematical / technical ability are a rare trinary intersection. It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound. It's the same old Square and Saw waves with the same instruments we have had for hundreds of years. Sadly i think musicianship has all but died in Gen Z, quantization / pitch correction / take splicing / overuse of compression are rampant, and every popular artist is basically as fake as Milli Vanilli. Protools has raised a generation of lazy and uncreative musicians with awful rhythm. Get off my lawn! Ok i'm done.
> I am surprised with all of the technology and VSTs we have now no one really uses self adjusting Just intonation
This is not possible with purely technological means. To "retune" and "adjust" even a single piece of music in a way that approaches just intervals you'd need an in-depth analysis of all meaningful dissonances, consonances, modulations, perhaps repetitions/imitations etc. etc. in the actual piece; and these are often not even evident from the actual notes because all music uses ornamentation at a variety of levels, hence lots of judgment calls are involved in the process. Where instruments are easy to retune in a flexible way (not really true of guitars, due to the use of physical frets) and the actual music allows for it, performers do use alternatives to equal temperament, such as a variety of "meantone" temperaments.
Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out.
Microtonal music really isn't hard to find. It's just not very popular, because it's too niche for mainstream listeners.
And most popular VSTs - Serum, Pigments, Massive, Phaseplant - all use wavetables and not 'the same old square and saw waves.'
Modern pop really isn't any more generic than 30s/40s jazz, 50s rock and roll and bubblegum, and so on. That's why it's called popular music and not experimental music.
Modern pop is more generic because the song you hear in the recording is not really played on real instruments or sang by a real person. The samples that were used to create it might have been, but they've been completed deconstructed and then reassembled in ProTools.
Even considering the stuff that Queen did for tracks like Bohemian Rhapsody where they used dozens of layered tracks isn't really the same thing. They used that layering to create a sound that wasn't possible, otherwise. But the tracks themselves were made from recording real people playing real instruments.
Modern pop, in comparison, is just about commoditization, slapping out a track at as little cost as possible. Everything gets lined up on a rigid beat grid, neutering any texture or feel in the song.
Rick Beato has a great video on what exactly is going on and why there actually is a significant difference with "post-ProTools" pop from previous years. https://youtu.be/L-8EbHkc8tc
There's a def "greatest hits" effect with jazz. I mean, how awesome is "Minnie the Moocher", etc.
There's also a "trailblazer" effect which is kind of weird because it doesn't happen in classical music. Namely that we listen a lot more to Miles Davis and Coltrane than the random swing band of their age. Heck, Miles gets more props than the sublime big band swing of Duke Ellington.
Honestly, out of all the things I've been paid for over the many years of my career, the one that gives the the most pleasure, thinking back, is being paid as an extra for The Blues Brothers.
Watching Cab Calloway do Minnie the Moocher in the 70s? Live? Paid for it? Priceless.
Working for Apple was awesome, as were the other places I've worked, but for sheer enjoyment per dollar, the Palladium in the 70s wins.
Blues, not metal or rock, is absolutely full of microtonal wails and chirps and wiggles and vibrato, and fret pressure very much gives way to a whole new way to think about the strings; not something to press down like a button at exactly perpendicular force to delicately or firmly contact the frets, but strings are something to be grabbed, ripped, whipped, twisted behind the frets. Add to that a hard attack can whiplash a string out of tune by another 10 cents, and we are talking about making this thing a voice, not some synthesized keyboard doodad. It's a human soul wailing. That's the blues.
Not rock? I guess we'd have to know your definition of "rock"... but if you allow "classic" or "progressive" rock into your view, then a lot of those players utilize every aspect of expression on the guitar.
And how about the whammy bar? Maybe guitarists aren't consciously using it to untemper their intervals, but to say "rock guitar" is locked to tempered tuning is incorrect.
Go listen to some of Dimebag Darrell’s solos. They sound ridiculously bad if played in whole semitones. Fair enough, he’s fairly bluesy. But other genres of metal give the distinction you give the left hand to the right too - variations in pick attack wildly change the sound.
I’m guessing it’s fair to suggest that similar things exist in all genres of music, and on all instruments.
You need to look into modern electronic instruments my friend. Micro tuning is a big thing. The way people play with timing and groove now is freer than ever due to the influence of hip hop on electronic music. The modern modular scene is way beyond just the old saw and square waves. Sure we keep some traditions like the 808 bass drum but there are a lot of interesting things out there.
Yes, but almost nobody is dropping raw 808 kick samples onto their tracks. Even though it's a "traditional sound", usually artists do quite a bit of work to transform it. Kind of like what, you know, "real" composers do with "real" musical traditions.
Check Jacob Collier if you haven't already. He is really pushing it, he has a song where he changes the temperament during the song (sorry if this imprecise/wrong). He is kinda like a musical prodigy. Not my cup of tea but I do recognize he is very refreshing.
Jacob Collier has tricks like using how many cents out of tune certain chords are in equal temperament from just intonation to find a sequence of chords that modulate to a half-sharp key without it ever sounding out of tune:
That's just the beginning. He posts long breakdowns of his tracks on YouTube explaining everything he does in detail. He's not only a musical virtuoso, but he's incredibly adept at recording and Apple's Logic/tech in general, so he's able to blend those skills seamlessly.
With Jacob and others getting people interested in tunings and unusual harmony, there are now lots of people on YouTube creating music that exploits shifting tunings or alternate systems like 24TET, etc. So to the grandparent post, don't worry - there has never been a time when so many young people are playing with and exploiting tuning systems to create interesting music.
> It saddens me that no one is really trying to push the envelope of acoustic instruments or even new ways of producting digital sound.
I don't know this to be true, I see people building weird musical instruments all the time. As for electronic sounds (it's not always digital) the modular community is absoultely teeming with expression. Here are some fun guys: https://youtu.be/AGN5N4vn5Bs
Chaotic orbits for "waves", running audio through cmos gates to produce pitch changes, running ADSRs through a filter to produce more random envelopes,... and he seems to come up with new module ideas monthly if not more often.
My most favorite recent module of his is based on cellular automata.
William Sethare has done a good amount of research into adaptatively tuning music so that the intervals are always simple ratios. You can find some examples of this here : https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/html/soundexamples.html
Unfortunately some sound examples are missing but a few of them are still online.
I'm not seeing any dead links there? That page has always been a listing of the mp3 files on the physical CD that comes with his book, only some of which were ever put online.
BTW, Sethares' research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sethares goes way beyond tuning music to simple ratios. His whole book is about working with a model of sounds being "in tune" with one another that doesn't just boil down to that.
What do you mean by “self adjusting just intonation”? Presumably you would need to sequence the desired key changes in your song, because I don’t think you’re going to want software to attempt that automatically. And it can get more complicated than that. I can imagine songs where you would want a melody note in one key to be sustained while the rest of the harmony transitions around it into a new key, which is also something that I can’t imagine being done automatically right now.
The Access Virus C I owned several years ago could automatically adjust major and minor thirds to be "perfect", but only when played as a chord. It made a big difference.
Actually, the way a piano is tuned is pretty funky.
The rigidity of the strings means the higher 'harmonics' of a note get sharper and sharper. If you tune the fundamentals to exact equal temperament a piano sounds out of tune, because the upper partials of lower notes are pretty sharp versus the lower partials of higher notes.
Hence the frequences of the fundamentals are stretched out such as to get the inharmonic partials as in tune sounding as possible between different notes.
This is why you hire a piano tuner to tune your piano.
> This is why you hire a piano tuner to tune your piano.
Idk... I think it's more about the hassle. People I've known let their piano get really out of tune (like we are talking a quarter tone off for some tones "just avoid those"), to the point where their own amateurish tuning would be a big improvement, before they call the tuner over.
I thought you were going to say you a violinist—that's the best example of perfect 4ths and 5ths that you can integrate with a band or orchestra that may include a normal 440 Hz A piano with equal temperament based on sqrt(2,12).
I am a violinist. :) That's my primary instrument. But even there you don't tune to perfects fifths all the time. In string quartets you tune the bottom C of the cello up a bit and the E's of the violins down a bit. But if you're playing with a piano in, say, a piano quintet, you generally play equal temperament with the piano.
But given the frets are placed to divide the length of the string in a specific place, you're aiming to play equal temperament, right? You're using that system on a typical guitar, even if the sounds don't match exactly.
Of course it's not going to be perfect, but it's still closer to 12TET-with-noise than some specific mediaeval tuning.
Yes and no. Those who play electric guitars with distortion prefer to approach Just Intonation(for a given key) as it doesn't have so much intermodulation.
There is an attempt to tune guitars close to equal temperament trademarked as True Temperament:
To use computing slang to talk about music: this is just ricing. At best you'll sound out of tune with the rest of the band, at worst you'll run into wolf intervals and other issues with just intonation.
This touches on the biggest reason we stick with 12-tone equal temparament in the West: social reasons. Having a standard means we can play together, in groups or at jams, without having to negotiate which tuning system we use (an argument most working musicians I've met see as utter wank and a waste of time).
Yea, it definitely has racist undertones related to import tuners. "Rice" implying "asian." I find it a bit uncomfortable to read people posting their customized Linux desktops, for example, and calling them "riced out."
Maybe I'm showing my power level a bit here. To me it means "tweaking something's aesthetics in a way that doesn't improve, perhaps even degrades, performance".
I wouldn't say that you aim to play equal temperament. More that it's the base structure you deviate from. I think my real point is that on most instruments you don't play only twelve tones. You play a whole lot more that get grouped into twelve groups.
> The first such transformation is to lower the third by one step to obtain a minor triad. For some reason, we perceive minor chords as sad or melancholy, sometimes a bit whiny.
I'd love to hear more on "some reason." In a way, it's so arbitrary, and maybe it's a cultural bias, but so sad. And the minor iv chord, so sad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQFtvAfHndE, right when he sings "when September ends," but there's are so many other examples.
Modern science has no idea! I've researched a fair bit. We don't know how the brain intreprets frequency combinations or why different ones sound good or bad together or evoke certain moods. Math can explain harmonics and the circle of fifths and how to assemble keys and modes, sure, but no one knows the Why or How of the internals between the ears. It is just cultural bias and repetition that we intrepret some note and chord combinations a certain way or is there something more fundamental going on with the hardware? Good question! Nobody knows.
All we have is anecdotal evidence and the trial and error of the musicians and composers who make it. Music is still a mystery.
I get a little annoyed at this notion of minor vs major. It's not binary. Subtle changes in tonality can shift back and forth between minor and major and diminished and augmented and so on. Most listeners will interpret a passage as "minor", but that doesn't mean it's so. Complex harmony can be reduced to minor or major but it robs it of all of its nuance.
One of my favorite examples of this is Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, but that may be because I've been practicing it on harmonica.
The song begins (with note names and relative major scale numbers):
Now here you go again
A C D E D C
6 1 2 3 2 1
(low)
But that's not how Stevie Nicks sings it. She starts the word "go" very flat, not quite all the way down to the Eb, but maybe 70 cents down from the E? And then she slides up to the E from there. Listen to her sing it and you will know what I'm talking about.
If you have an instrument where you can play either the straight notes or the notes with that slide, play it both ways and you will hear the difference.
This song is fun and easy to play on harmonica, including the pitch bends, if you get or make the right harp. You need a High C Melody Maker, which you can order from Seydel or you can take a Lee Oskar F Major and retune it into a C Melody Maker: raise the blow 3 from C to D, and raise the draw 5 and draw 9 from Bb to B.
How do you retune a harmonica? You file the reeds! Take off some weight near the free end of a reed and it will vibrate faster, giving it a higher pitch. More strangely, you can also lower the pitch a little by thinning the reed near the fixed end.
I mean if you move down 3 notes from any Major key you have your Minor key with the same exact notes, like C Major and A Minor.
I usually compose with a Major or Minor key in mind, but it's kind of a reference and not a be all end all. I like sharp 4's which work great usually and don't fit in either key. A flat 7 sounds great in a major key too, usually. I agree with you mostly, and i am annoyed by people who are adamant about the rules of a key, but it helps me to have a key in mind to both play and compose, even if i break the rules of it.
I find improvising on piano / guitar is nearly impossible if you don't know the key, even after many years of playing both.
If you think in terms of modes, then using a sharp 4 in major you can think of as lydian (the 4th mode of major) or lydian dominant (has a flat 7 too, the 4th mode of melodic minor). In minor, there's lydian minor (the 4th mode of harmonic major).
Major but with a flat 7 is mixolydian (the fifth mode of major). It is everywhere in popular music.
My favourite thing at the moment is major 7 sharp 5 chords (or an augmented triad with also a major 7th). These chords arise in harmonic and melodic minor (in both cases chord 3), and in harmonic major (chord 6). But they also sound great as substitutions for what is 'supposed' to be a major 7 chord.
former brain scientist weighing in here. the brain seems to do some operations which resemble Fourier transforms. We also use logrithmic scaling. Combine those two and you get a lot of the harmonics.
So yes, you ask a good question, but in fact there is some knowledge of the hardware which supports the empirical observations of musicians and composers.
and yes, music is still a mystery. There is a lot more going on than scale, pitch, and harmonics.
> Minor chords? In pop and rock? They're used all over the place. It's more rare to not find one in a song. Minor chords with added sevenths, yeah, less common.
Yeah, exactly my first thought, pick any Beatles, Pink Floyd or Radiohead album for the most mainstream, off-the-top-of-my head examples.
Leave My Girl Alone by Stevie Ray Vaughan is pretty much a master class for a guitar player that wants to mess around with 3rds and 7ths. At 3:19 is the best example of slightly messing with the 3rd and resolving to the 1 that I can remember hearing. The solos center around bent 3rds, 4ths, b5ths and 7ths.
One thing is minor is unquestionably more dissonant than major; a major chord (in just intonation) is one of the most powerful sounds in existence which is why Baroque music almost always ends on major -- ie not to "sound happy" but to end with a bang.
This dissonance is related to why a composer like Bach has many, many compositions in minor (and massive ones like the B-minor mass), but not much later, you see composers using minor less and less as they moved towards more consonance (along with modulation of course).
For instance, in all of Mozart's violin sonatas there's only one minor. And it's freaking awesome ... but he didn't want to write more than that.
I think that while dissonance was interesting to Bach, it was less so through the rest of the common period, so that favors major.
I would also add that Salsa as a genre uses minor keys for happy tunes all the time.
I think that the language we use might be limiting our analysis of this topic. We often describe minor keys as sad, but I don't think that really describes the emotion. Dark is also used, but doesn't necessarily imply sadness. Dark has problems too, as it's more vague.
Even though many people would describe certain songs as sounding sad, I don't think that it usually makes them feel sad. Can a song be sad if it doesn't make you feel sad? Heavy metal wouldn't be popular if it actually made you unhappy. Personally, it can improve my mood if I feel sad. Conversely, a really "bubblegummy" pop song would get on my nerves, but I would still describe it as sounding happy.
I'm not even sure that we could come up with better labels using common words. The emotions caused by music are pretty unique (at least for me).
> People who have not been exposed to Western music don’t even distinguish consonance from dissonance.
This is false. Any person with a functioning auditory system can hear the beating when you play two very close notes. It is also trivial to model mathematically, using elementary trigonometry. And the beating of periodic waves of very close frequency is precisely the dissonance (especially when the partials of the two notes are close, but do not coincide exactly).
Whether this audible beating or dissonance is "good" or "bad", and what is its place in music, is an entirely cultural phenomenon. But the phenomenon itself is not a cultural construction, it is a physical thing. Western music uses dissonance as a tension before a final resolution, and this is of course an arbitrary choice for our musical language.
This is incorrect. Consonance or dissonance is based on physical properties of the sounds. As the paper mentions, pleasantness of the consonance vs dissonance varies from culture to culture. The paper specifically mentions in the abstract that the other cultures were able to distinguish consonance from dissonance.
The physical property is generally called "roughness" (mostly to disambiguate wrt. the structural sense of 'dissonance' in composition) and is really more of a psychoacoustic property, since it relates to a feature of hearing known as critical bandwidth.
Depends on your language use - hrs talking in terms of semitones throughout the article, so thats correct; you're thinking in terms of whole /half steps (so you would be correct if the article was written in those terms).
I think talking in semitones helps clear up any misunderstanding over the explicit intervals present in a chord (and I've found that very useful when talking to guitar pupils who only know guitar and want to understand theory, particularly because the guitar neck is made of semitones), but if someone knows more scale theory (or plays piano), then talking in scale steps makes more sense.
'Step' has a specific meaning in music and it doesn't mean 'semitone'. Why not just use semitone seeing as that precisely describes what's intended? Conflating meanings seems like it could be confusing. "The tritone of this note is 6 steps up" "Gotcha, so the tritone of C is B" "No no, by step I currently mean tones, not semitones" "Ah, so 3 scale tones, ok" "No just 3 tones, or 6 steps" "Ok, I'll count 6 steps, 1,2,3,4..."...just use the correct word.
"Step" refers to an interval gap of "half step" or "whole step". In a way, I could see this as a "specific meaning", but since it refers to a group of intervals and not a single one, I would be quite open to a definition where '1 step' is always '1 half step', since both 'semitone' and 'half step' imply a less useful fundamental value of 2 half steps, even though music that involves only whole steps is quite dissonant and uncommon (the whole tone scale).
Your entire hypothetical dialogue is confusing as well, since your hypothetical person isn't using correct words either. The situation where C + 6 of something = B is with scale degrees (C moved 6 scale degrees up is B). And then you say "I currently mean tones", when 6 "tones" has the exact same grouping problem you are criticizing (because 'whole tone' and 'semitone' have the exact same meaning as 'whole step' and 'half step', only now 'scale tone' is in the group too). This artificially lengthens the example.
"The tritone of this note is 6 steps up" "Gotcha, so the tritone of C is B" "No, that's scale degrees, by 'step' I mean 'half step'." "Oh, so it's F# then." Done.
> "Step" refers to an interval gap of "half step" or "whole step"
Right, but it does not mean 'half step'. It means one or other depending on the harmonic context, not the language context as said above. In the case in the article, a "step" down from the third is the second, not the minor third as the article says.
> I would be quite open to a definition where '1 step' is always '1 half step'
I don't understand this, sorry. Why not just use semitone?
> Since both 'semitone' and 'half step' imply a less useful fundamental value of 2 half steps
Western music isn't fundamentally chromatic either, so talking in semitones isn't particularly useful.
As you imply with reference to wholetones and dissonance, the words tone/semitone also give useful melodic information that we've all already learned. E.g. raising the 5th a tone is consonant, raising the major 3rd a tone is dissonant. Of course you could teach students that not all steps/two steps are the same, depending on scale degree, but then you're back to square one, just with different words for semitone/tone.
> Your entire hypothetical dialogue is confusing as well, since your hypothetical person isn't using correct words either.
Yeah it's meant to be confusing, my point is that overloading terms gets confusing quickly, at least for me.
I realized when reading your response that you use "tone" for "whole tone". So from my perspective you're overloading "tone", which could mean semitone, whole tone, or scale degree tone, to only mean two half-steps, but to me, it's like your perspective that in the article the word "step" is overloaded to mean one half-step. I think it is more useful, if you were to define fundamental unit of pitch as one half-step, since there are of course many intervals that you cannot describe with just a number of whole-tones. It's one syllable and corresponds to one note = 1, instead of the notion of "half" and then you have to explain how the difference between E and F is '1 half', I think it is a mess.
And - I personally analyze music in semitones, not scale degrees. I find it much more useful. Even though that's not considered "standard" there are some things even standard theory has to use chromatic language to describe, like the tritone (you could get into "#4 or b5" but that would require a lot more than just saying 6 semitones).
Pshh... Unfortunately things aren't that consistent or that would have been pointed out much earlier. C to C# and C to D are both considered 'steps' (see 'stepwise motion'). That is to say, "half" and "whole" are treated like two different types of steps in traditional theory. (that and "whole" is a much less useful fundamental unit as I said before)
I was expecting a bit more category theory. But I was glad to see that he alludes to the duality of minor chords and major chords.
A simple way to look at it is like this: Pick two notes, i.e., an interval.
Then pick a note in the middle of the two notes. The dual chord is the one where you swap the up and down chromatic distances. Then if you happened to pick a 5th interval, and you happened to pick the major 3rd as middle note, then the minor is dual to it.
But you can go further. Pick the octave and choose the 5th now as your middle note. Then the 4th is dual to this.
You can drop the chromatic condition and work in a key with a scale and things like that. Also, the 12 chromatic notes form a group with inverses as duals. Then the 5th is dual to the 4th, but now the 3rd will be dual to the 6th—equivalent to the interval construction where you take the octave above.
I've read your post several times and I don't get how this duality is useful and how to apply it.
The "duality" of major/minor seems very different that "duality" of 4th and 5th. One completely changes music harmony, while other is basically interchangeable. When is it useful to think in these terms?
Exactly because they have effects that sound different and are instances of the same general principle.
Edit: The idea is not to stop there. You also have the minor 7th chord being dual to the major 7th chord (with the octave added implicitly). Those two chords are often used together in jazz music. In this case the interval you use to get the upper note is a 4th. And depending on which interval you are focusing on, and what kind of scale you use (if not chromatic) this simple concept can get much more interesting.
I agree that playing for example C E G and then C Eb G sounds like a "change", but I don't think the theory gives you complementary chords in sequence. They connect ideas with each other. In that sense it makes sense for a major chord to be dual to a minor chord.
This is why I like the guitar/bass over the piano, because these relationships show themselves when you play. On a piano, if you go from C to E# the hand shape is totally different than A to C, even though the intervals are the same, so this relationship isn't intuitive.
I'm guessing that you learned guitar before piano? My first instrument was piano and I don't really think about hand shape when I play chords on it. My internal visualization of music is primarily founded on a piano keyboard with musical staves as secondary.
I will say that playing multiple musical instruments gives the same kind of multiple ways of looking at a thing that multiple programming languages does. One of the things that was a little strange for me when I first picked up the flute was the idea that lower notes were further away from me as opposed to being closer the way that I was used to thinking of them with bass (particularly double bass which was my first stringed instrument). Meanwhile, on brass instruments, different pitches don't really have any spatial location at all.
My first instrument was also piano (classical). I never really thought of hand shape while playing chords either, but I understand the parent comment - since your hand position does change, it makes the absolute key much more important, and it makes it more difficult to see the relative jumps.
I don't think I ever had a good feel for how chords relate to each other before I started playing the accordion recently. On the left hand of an accordion, every chord interval is identical - C major to D major is just two positions away, exactly the same as D major to E major. It's also arranged in the circle of fifths, so any chord progression can be arbitrarily transposed (until you run out of range on the ends) That really helps me feel how chords progress and for the first time I'm feel comfortable playing chords by ear in real-time.
So that's why the accordian player I walk past on the promenade always sounds like he's playing Autumn Leaves: circle of fourths/fifths chord progressions are very natural to play on the instrument.
(Of course, he's not playing Autumn Leaves; that's just the first tune I think of with that chord progression; but there are zillions. The Beatles' You Never Give Me Your Money, and I Will Survive are a couple of other famous popular music ones.)
I took piano lessons at age 9 for about a 6 months but it never really took and I didn't practice. I played trombone for 3 years junior high, but didn't really practice then, either. Then I took music theory and composition classes in college, which revealed to me that thinking in intervals and scale degrees made way more sense to me than staves and note names. At that point bass and guitar clicked and really complemented that way of thinking.
I should also add I'm really only competent at one instrument which is bass guitar, probably because I played in a church praise band for a bit which made me actually have a reason to practice.
I too was thinking there would be a category theory angle on this, but of course it makes sense to have diverse interests.
The question of whether musical notation is Turing complete, and what it might mean if it were, would have been an interesting one for a category theorist to examine.
> We now use the so called equal temperament system...
Unless I'm playing a piano, no, I don't. And since I have an electric piano, I have been known to set it to meantone, but I accept that I'm a freak.
Even on a guitar you have a fair amount of variation in pitch based on pressure and position of the left hand fingers relative to the fret. Not as much as on old instruments with gut frets, but it's there.