Tunings, part 1

In the blog post entitled Registers, I discussed how my various guitar-family instruments are in different registers, and further that they are all in my own different tunings.  I have multiple Excel files and notebooks full of tunings that I've devised, which were used on which recording sessions, on which tours, and so forth.

Over the past several months, I've been experiementing with extended baritone registers, and also different tunings within each register.  

Using the Martin 12-strings, I've been able to explore baritone registers such a B, A, and G, while using different tunings within each of those registers.  I've discovered some interesting and effective tunings and textures.  I found at least one new tuning and tuning concept that I likely would not have discovered using any of the other instruments.

This week in preparation for a recording session, I discovered that a specific tuning that works well in a given register may not work as well or at all when that tuning is transposed into a different register.  While frustrating, that was and is a fascinating discovery.  In some ways it's not surprising, as moving a set of intervals into a different register is certainly going to have an aural impact on those registers and the resultant overtone series.  In another way, I was somewhat surprised as regardless of the register, it's still the same intervalic and pitch class relationships.  

This raises an entirely new problem.  How to achieve the color and fabric of tuning X when transposing it into a different register.  Does this indicate that the impact of a specific tuning is not entirely based on or solely determined by its intervalic relationships and pitch classes?  I would have been certain that the colors, fabric, and impact of a tuning were indeed entirely determined by the intervalic relationships and pitch classes within that tuning.  But it seems that's not exactly the case.

Acknowledging that, the new quest is how to establish or re-create the color of a specific tuning when transposing it into a different register.  Right now, that's a very puzzling and almost disturbing issue.

Currently unsure as to surmounting this issue, but I'll get there.

-kk