"If you had a great-sounding barred A, your barred D sounded awful. There was no tuning around the problem."
“Rather than tune each string to its accurate pitch, he borrowed a trick from piano tuners and tuned subjectively, getting the instrument to sound pleasant.”
"I started doing what I called ‘intonation modeling,’ modeling intonation schemes, and I documented what I was doing. I discovered that there is a window that exists in terms of intervals before they start to sound out of tune."
Again, this points to Buzz chasing the natural harmonic scale on an instrument that can’t resolve it.
Now, this sounds to me as though Buzz is actually starting to tune his guitar to equal temperament almost by trial and error, by reference to the piano.
This “window” Feiten refers to is called the “difference limen”. It is this which equal temperament exploits by tweaking every interval slightly. The largest discrepancy in equal temperament is between the harmonic scale’s minor third and equal temperament’s minor third. The difference in pitch is just under 1% (approximately 15.5 cents). The difference between the fourths is just over a tenth of that. It is beginning to sound as though Feiten is re-inventing Equal Temperament from the perspective of someone who doesn’t realise that it’s already been done!
