Ben Hjertmann
Music Composition, Teaching, Recording, Instrument Building
Elliot's 7-Limit Raga Guitar
This guitar is a semi-hollow body custom adaptation featuring a new fretboard, frets and inlays. It features a fixed tuning of C-G-C-G-C-C in which the highest two strings are a unison.
It is designed around a raga scale developed by Michael Harrison and adapted/expanded by Elliot Cole and myself into the tuning you see below. It uses 5-Limit major thirds above a series of pitches with 3-Limit relationships. It contains only the 3-Limit (not 5-Limit) minor thirds from those basic roots. We added a 7th harmonic only from the root of C, expanding it just one step into the 7-Limit. You'll notice an almost 12-fret per octave layout with one split fret (the 2nd fret) and one bonus fret (the 7th harmonics added below the 10th fret and the octave above, only on the C strings.




