C-G^b-C-G^b-C-G^b

• OVERVIEW •

A ‘regular’ stack of tritones, forming what could be loosely described as a ‘diminished power chord’ (1-b5-1 instead of 1-5-1). The 6-fret jumps neatly bisect our 12-semitone octave, making the tuning symmetrical from any string – i.e. wherever you are, the same note names will be found at the same positions on the strings above and below.

 

This also makes it the only (non-unison) tuning that preserves ‘lefty involution‘: the ability to turn the guitar ‘upside-down’ and play all shapes the same way (and in my experience, left-handed players always love it when you hand them a tritone-tuned guitar at the party…as do all the guests).

Pattern: 6>6>6>6>6

Harmony: C/Gb tritone | 1-b5-1-b5-1-b5

• TUNING TONES •

• SOUNDS •

Despite the implications of its name, the ‘tritone’ is a 2-note interval, not a 3-note chord (‘tri’=3, ‘tone’=‘whole-tone’ gap of 2 semitones). Given the resulting layout’s harmonic awkwardness, non-experimental use remains rare (then again, what piece isn’t in some way an experiment?).

 

By far the most prominent instance I could track down is fusion virtuoso Shawn Lane’s impressively melodic Tri 7\5…released on his 1993 album The Tri-Tone Fascination. Presumably, other geometrically curious guitarists have also used the tuning at some point: let me know if you know of any…and send in your own sounds too!

 

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• Tri 7/5 – Shawn Lane (1993):

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“Lane was self-educated: a voracious reader who became an expert in Indian music, cinema, piano playing, and a wide range of other topics. Barry Bays, a longtime friend…was astounded on a trip to the Memphis library: ‘He filled a cart and checked out 30 to 40 books…The limit was 5 or 6, but they’d let him take whatever he wanted, because they had known him since he was 5. He’d read 5 or 10 books at a time, and have absolute recall…He had an extraordinary mind’.” (Guitar World)

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And no, the tritone was never banned for being the ‘devil’s interval’. While it certainly brings a dissonant, unresolved ‘spice’, there is scant evidence that any religious authority ever instructed composers to avoid it, as highlighted in two excellent videos from Adam Neely. In fact, tritones have featured throughout church music history – including in the work of 12th-century polyphonist Pérotin, the 13th-century Cantigas song collection from Spain, and countless more.

 

The Medieval Music & Arts Foundation expands on the myth: “Jacobus [in 1325] includes the tritone…as one of the 13 basic intervals, and also proposes as a distinct 14th interval (the ‘semitritonus’ of [588 cents]), which he finds somewhat less discordant…Although rare, these intervals do occur in the ecclesiastical chants; and granted that they are…difficult to sing, nevertheless their theory is interesting and beautiful…the tritone, far from being viewed as ‘diabolic’, is treated as an interval which can be pleasing and even ‘consonant’ in the right context…”.

 

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• Myth of the Medieval Tritone Ban – Adam Neely (2021):

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For some prominent tritonal examples from recent music: listen to the intro stabs to Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze, the first line of Eddie Vedder’s vocals in Pearl Jam’s Even Flow, and the theme songs to both South Park (by Primus) and The Simpsons (by Danny Elfman, in the Lydian Dominant scale: 1-2-3-#4-5-6-b7).

 

Also check out r/musictheory’s list of pieces with tritone modulations, including After The Love Has Gone (Earth, Wind, & Fire), Till Death (Japanese Breakfast), and Skaukatt (Kristoffer Frisk Sjöström), plus my personal favourite: the “first bars of Freeze Eezy Peak in the N64 game Banjo Kazooie“. They also occur as a motif throughout West Side Story – watch its composer Leonard Bernstein explain Debussy’s use of tritones in Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (from ‘Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity’: the fourth of his 1973 Harvard Lectures).

 

To me, a more fitting brand of tritonal mythology can be found in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (himself an accomplished guitarist, who once guested with Pink Floyd): where the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, an incompetent multi-planetary business entity, builds a “choir of robots” to celebrate the runaway success of its own Complaints department. But, when they come to sing the company song (‘Share and Enjoy‘), “unfortunately…[one] of the computing errors for which the company is justly famous means that the robots’ voiceboxes are exactly a flattened fifth out of tune: and the result sounds something like this…”:

 

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• Share and Enjoy (b5 mix) – Sirius Robot Choir (1978):

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“Or grinds when it moves, and gives you no joy; Cause it’s eaten your hat, or had sex with your cat; Bled oil on your floor, or ripped off your door; And it gets to the point, you can’t stand anymore…”

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Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a sense of foreboding at the fact that this is (currently) the only tuning on the Menu to feature any adjacent tritones at all: and also, its interval pattern is ‘6-6-6…‘. Has my project design been unwittingly guided by supernatural forces? For any Satanic entities who may be reading, consider giving me feedback here: and also check out the exploits of fellow global demons in my writeup for Norway’s Hardingfele violin (“Such is the hypnotic nature of nackastamning [‘devil’s tuning’] that players can go into a trance…[or] the devil himself may show up at the dance, grab the fiddle, and play until the guests are dead from exhaustion”) – and for India’s Raag Malkauns (“Ali Akbar Khan…cautioned students against entering its realm with the wrong mindset: “If you’re not in a serious mood, then don’t play or sing Malkauns. You must take extra care…It is a favourite raag of the djinns [spirits], you see. If you can charm them…they will do anything for you. If they don’t, they will kill you”).

 

And, while Robert Johnson’s fiendish fingerpicking skills arose from hard study with local teacher Ike Zimmerman rather than any roadside soul-selling, Baroque violinist Giuseppe Tartini reminds us that such tales have accompanied the (self-)mythologisation of musicians for many centuries. The Italian virtuoso gained notoriety after claiming to have met Lucifer in his dreams: “I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play”.

 

“How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy! I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote…but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument, and have said farewell to music forever: if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.” (So I guess he’s saying that his 1713 ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata is…just a tribute?)

 

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• Violin Sonata in Gm – Giuseppe Tartini (1713):

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“Proclaimed by the Italians as ‘the finest musician in the world’, he was referred to by the French as ‘the lawgiver of the bow’, [Tartini] burned with a Faustian desire for knowledge: he owned an impressive library containing books on many subjects, and was intensely curious about philosophy, religion, harmonics, acoustics, and mathematics…” (David Castleton)

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• NUMBERS •

	6str	5str	4str	3str	2str	1str
Note	C	Gb	C	Gb	C	Gb
Alteration	-4	-3	-2	-1	1	2
Tension (%)	-37	-29	-21	-11	12	26
Freq. (Hz)	65	92	131	185	262	370
Pattern (>)	6	6	6	6	6	–
Semitones	0	6	12	18	24	30
Intervals	1	b5	1	b5	1	b5

• See my Tunings Megatable for further such nerdery: more numbers, intervallic relations, comparative methods, etc. And to any genuine vibratory scientists reading: please critique my DIY analysis!

• RELATED •

—Associated tunings: proximities of shape, concept, context, etc…

• All Minor Thirds: halving each of the tritone jumps
• All Fifths: see what a difference a semitone makes
• All Fourths: like a reverse cycling of perfect fifths

• MORE INFO •

—Further learnings: sources, readings, lessons, other onward links…

• Evil tunings: apart than the examples above, there are many other dark, devilish, dissonant dimensions of tuning: such as the microtonal ‘wolf 5th’ interval (738 cents: named for its ‘howling’ quality) – and also see Prof. Andrew Filmer’s blog on Angels, Devils, & Mistuned Instruments (“Since the devil stopped playing the bagpipes around the end of the medieval period, the violin has been his preferred instrument of choice…scordatura [altered tuning]…[was] used by Mahler and Saint-Saëns to depict the Devil as a fiddler, playing to a band of witches”)
• Tritonal quirks: while the interval was never banned, it does summon mysterious audiology paradoxes – in Diana Deutsch’s 1986 paper The Tritone Paradox: An Influence of Speech on How Music is Perceived, she details how the ‘up/down’ motion of tritonal intervals can be ambiguous: “two computer-generated tones…are related by a half-octave [tritone]…[If] played in succession, some people hear an ascending pattern, yet other people hear a descending one. Indeed, a group of people will disagree completely among themselves…How people hear the ‘tritone paradox’ varies with…geographic location [and] native language…Californians hear this pattern differently [to those in] the South of England [and] Vietnam. [Thus] the way we perceive music is related to our language, and generally reveals strong effects of our memories and expectations” (listen to four examples here – and tell the researchers whether you think they go up or down!)

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Header image: Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Le Songe de Tartini (1824)