Earlier in the year we acquired a ukulele. Having played violin years ago, I was impressed by innovations - a digital tuner is much better than the pitch pipes whose pitch varied depending on how hard you blew - I know I should have been able to do it all with an A and an ear…)
And I only now learned that the metal bars running across the fingerboard of ukuleles, guitars, etc. don’t just guide the fingers but actually stop the string themselves, making tuning more precise - which set me wondering why I never had frets on my violin…
I don’t think frets will ever be standard for violins for a host of reasons discussed at Why Violins Don’t Have Frets – It’s Simple to Explain! - apparently including trickier vibrato and glissando, interfering with the string, and enforcing equal temperament - but I see that you can get them:
Image: Stratton Gypsy Fretted Electric Violin, with Starfish Designs bridge - Electric Violin Shop
But mentioning them is a reason to post a few lines from the symmetrically composed Crab Canon dialogue in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
This has the exchange
TORTOISE: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?
ACHILLES: To be precise, one has no frets.
TORTOISE: Oh well, it’s all the same to me.
ACHILLES: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
TORTOISE: Say, don’t you play the guitar?…
followed, later in the dialogue, by
ACHILLES: Say, don’t you play the guitar?
TORTOISE: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
ACHILLES: Oh well, it’s all the same to me.
TORTOISE: To be precise, one has no frets.
ACHILLES: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?…
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