← the temple the twelve notes · the tone scale after Paul Foster Case
A fretboard with every note on it, in whatever tuning you give it. A scale is lit over it, C major to start, with its root in amber; a chord over that, filled, with the shapes it makes under four fingers; and the rest of the twelve in the faint ink, so nothing is hidden. Tap a note to hear it and to have it named, with what the temple lays on it: by Paul Foster Case's tone scale every note is a sign of the zodiac and a trump, and some of them a planet as well, so that the sky this minute is a chord you can play.
tap a note to hear it and name it
thirds stacked on each degree, as triads and as sevenths; tap one to light it and hear it
highest string first; each turns a semitone at a time
the intervals of the scale, from its root; press one to add it or take it away, then keep it under a name
and the chord's, from its root
The neck is drawn as it is built, nearly: each fret a twelfth root of two nearer the bridge than the last, so that the twelfth fret halves the string and sounds its octave, though the spacing here is evened out a little so the high frets have room for their names. The notes are equal-tempered from A at 440, and the sound is a plucked string made the way Karplus and Strong made one in 1983, a burst of noise fed round a loop as long as the note's period and softened each time round. The shapes are found by the page, not looked up: in each four-fret window it tries every way of putting a chord tone or nothing under each string, keeps those with the root in the bass, every tone present (a fifth may go missing from a chord of four or more), no muted string above a sounding one and no more than four fingers, a barre counting as one, and shows the most playable at each position.
The tone scale is Paul Foster Case's, from the Builders of the Adytum's tarot of the 1920s, which hung a note and a colour on each of the twenty-two trumps. Laid out it is simpler than it sounds: the twelve semitones from C go round the zodiac from Aries, as the twelve colours go round the spectrum from red, so that C is Aries and the Emperor, and red; E is Leo and Strength, and yellow; B is Pisces and the Moon, and violet-red. Each planet and element sits on the note of its trump, which puts Mars, the Tower and fire on C, the Sun on D, Mercury, the Magician and air on E, Venus on F♯, the Moon, the High Priestess and water on G♯, Saturn on A and Jupiter on A♯. The letters and trumps are the Golden Dawn's, as the cards and the wheel have them. It is a correspondence, not an acoustics: nothing about a fifth makes Scorpio follow Aries, and the Pythagoreans, who had the planets sounding first, put them on other notes. The sky's chord takes where the seven stand this minute over Portland, from the wheel's ephemeris, rooted on the Sun's sign; the hour's key is the note of the planet whose hour it is, by the temple's clock of planetary hours. Your tunings, scales, chords and settings are kept in this browser and sent nowhere.
The scales and chords are anyone's. The tone scale is Case's, in The Tarot (1947) and his Builders of the Adytum lessons; the trumps' letters and planets are Book T's. The neck, the shapes and the sound are made here, in one script with no library.