Mike Battaglia | Sweet Lorraine (31-TET version) - Some Stride Piano for you all

**TURN ON SUBTITLES TO SEE REAL-TIME THEORY NOTES!** Some stride piano for you all! This is the jazz standard “Sweet Lorraine.“ Hope you enjoy. This version is tuned to 31 tone equal temperament (“31-TET“). I start off mostly playing things that sound like 12, but as the tune goes on, I start throwing in musical techniques that are way different from 12! There’s also a version in 19 tone equal temperament: Since I don’t have a 31-TET instrument, I had to make this in a few parts. First, I made notes about the scales/chords/progressions/etc that I wanted to play at some point. Then I did an initial rendition in 12, where I played the closest equivalent to those things. Then I did an initial “naive“ retune to 31-TET, where I just changed each 12-TET note to the nearest 31-TET note. Since this isn’t always the “right“ way to retune, I then went note-by-note and changed every note so that it was right, e.g. making sure I play “C#“ when I want C# and “Db“ when I want Db. Then I changed whatever was left to match my notes, e.g. replaced some chromatic runs with the “miracle“ decatonic scale, etc. This was all in Pianoteq. Some background information on 19-TET and 31-TET for you... -- 19-TET and 31-TET are two “magic numbers“ of notes per octave that are magically “backward-compatible“ with most Western music, but also have new stuff. This is a pretty rare property! If you tried playing this tune with, for instance, 18, 20, 23, or 30 notes per octave, or whatever, it wouldn’t happen - some of these tunings don’t even have major chords in them. But with 19-TET and 31-TET, things magically sync up. The only other small equal temperament you get this property with is 24-TET (aka just adding exact “quarter tones“ to 12-TET). To be brief about it, 31-TET was basically *the* main tuning used in Europe for hundreds of years. To be precise, the European tuning was something called “1/4-comma meantone,“ mathematically derived slightly differently, but in which the notes they used are all within a cent or two of 31-TET. As a result, music theorists have talking about 31-TET going all the way back to the Renaissance! Similarly, 19-TET is within a fraction of a cent of “1/3-comma meantone“ - less common than 31-TET/1/4-comma, but also talked about for hundreds of years. However, harpsichords tuned to a 19-tone subset of 31-TET were fairly common, such as this reconstruction of Carlo Gesualdo’s “Chromatic Harpsichord,“ built by Augusto Bonza, photo by son Alberto Bonza (). Many of these existed for hundreds of years! If your goal is to be able to play Western music and also add new things, then 31-TET has some truly incredible properties, and is somewhat of a musical “Rosetta Stone“: not only does it have its historical background with meantone temperament, but it also has a really good approximation to harmonics up to the 11-limit; it has something like “quarter tones“ in that you get a “neutral third“ or “middle third“ right between the minor and major thirds, likewise with a “neutral second,“ etc; you have scales somewhat resembling Arabic maqam scales: Rast, Bayati, etc; an “enharmonic scale“ that splits the whole tone into three and goes C-C#-Db-D-...; many new chord progressions, scales, chords, etc; all with the meantone/tonal “backbone“ when you want. It is also refreshing that the “blue note,“ aka the “middle third“ between minor and major that blues musicians often play, now gets granted “real note“ status in 31-TET, rather than being some “weird bendy thing“ that doesn’t get the status of properly “existing“ as a “true note“ in 12-TET. 19-TET is kind of the “mini“ version of the above - you don’t get neutral thirds, quasi-Arabic scales, or as good an approximation to the 11-limit, but you do get a taste of some of that stuff, if you play the proper voicings; you get the enharmonic scale; you get a whole host of new chords, chord progressions, and scales; you even get an approximation to the Bohlen Pierce scale; etc. It’s a little quirky, but it has its own personality that I somewhat like! At the very least it’s like “training wheels“ for 31-TET with fewer notes. In addition to 19 and 31, there are also some “quasi-Western“ tunings at 17-TET (which has nice smooth “subminor“ chords, but very strange sharp major chords), 22-TET (like an extreme version of 17-TET), 26-TET (in which everything is super flat, but it’s kind of nice in a way), 27-TET (a super-extreme version of 17-TET and 22-TET), and 29-TET (Pythagorean-esque tuning with nice fifths but sharp major thirds) notes per octave. These are recognizable to some degree but are very different. You can listen to these at my SoundCloud, where I take a Bach Fugue and retune it to all of these tunings and a few others: