Triple Courses, part 5

Of late, I've been further experimenting with the tuning of triple courses.  The original concept was to tune them to tone clusters.  Which has been the defacto tuning, and within that concept, there are many clusters I've utilized for the triple course tunings.  I really love it, and it fulfills my original premise for triple courses.  It also creates a very dense and beautiful maze of a harmonic environment.  

As an experiment, I tried tuning one of the triple courses to a triadic chord.  With all the tone cluster tunings, I'd yet to arrive at trying anything within the realm of tertial harmony.  I didn't expect to like it; I was merely trying it out of mild curiosity.  

To my surprise, I liked it.  Maybe it's the sharp contrast provided by the tertial harmony when I'm used to hearing tone clusters coming from the triple courses.  After trying it on one course, I decided to try it on all three triple courses on the Martin X-15 15-string baritone.  Wow.  What I heard isn't what I was expecting.  It's much richer and deeper than I'd expected.  

Currently, the X-15 has three triple courses tuned to triads, and three double courses tuned to octaves.  It's not only a beautiful harmonic environment, but it brings such a wonderful contrast and counterpoint to the tone cluster triple courses on the 30-string Double Contraguitar.  

I had a recording session last week for an upcoming album project with Sandor Szabo, and I tried using the X-15 for it.  I really liked how it worked in that setting; in fact, I liked it far more than I expected.

Thus far, I've only tried this using three triads.  No doubt I'll be expanding this in the near future to hear other colors using differing tertial harmonies for the triple courses.  Exciting.

-kk