EMBRACING AN ANOMALY

 while perusing an issue of magazine, I stumbled upon a lesson called the “The Warp Refraction Principle” by columnist Jon Finn. An esteemed player, author and Berklee College of Music professor, Finn is obviously a fellow avid sci-fi fan and knew how to draw me in with that title. In that gem of a lesson, Jon explained that the guitar fretboard is divided into two separate and similarly ordered universes. The line between them is drawn by a lone interval within the five pairs of adjacent strings produced by standard tuning: (low to high) E, A, D, G, B, E. In examining each adjacentstring pair, you’ll observe that all but one are a perfect 4th, or two and one half steps, apart — E - A, A - D, D - G and B - E — leaving a single major 3rd interval, equal to two whole steps, between the G and B strings. Though seemingly inconsequential, this half-step and one-fret difference creates a fair amount of fretboard chaos, especially for those who thrive in the otherwise symmetrical regions. Playing the same perfect 4th interval, for example, C to F, across all five adjacent-string pairs ( ) reveals the issue at hand. The dyad