This is the site home page of The Online Encyclopedia of Tunings
Welcome
The Online Encyclopedia of Tunings (TOEOT to its friends) is a potentially collaborative effort to set up a comprehensive reference work on the tunings of stringed instruments. Would you like to help write it?
It came out of ongoing work at English Wikipedia, see about this site and its creator for some of this history. But there are important differences between this wiki and Wikipedia, in two main areas: Style and content.
Style
As in, we're not all that stylish at all here, instead we're interested in content, content, and content. The facts, ma'am, just stick to the facts. So this wiki is set up to make it as easy as possible to add them and access them.
Despite some very egalitarian priniciples, Wikipedia can be downright uppity at times. They insist on using the "proper" sharp and flat symbols, ♯ and ♭, for example. The main problems here are that some browsers can't handle them, and that it takes an eon to type them. Here at TOEOT we just use # and b, as in for example F# for F-sharp and Bb for B-flat. These cause no problems at all. They may not look as cute, but that's not the point. There are a couple of instances that could get ugly, for example we don't write bb for b-flat, but b♭ is even ugglier on some browsers. A little commonsense works wonders!
(The purists may reflect that the flat symbol is historically a stylised letter b... as are also both the sharp symbol and the natural symbol!)
See Standards and Conventions for details, and tips for contributors if you think you might like to be one.
And as the site has developed, another related difference has emerged... Opinions. Wikipedia strives to keep all opinions out of its articles. Actually that's not quite right; Notable opinions (of notable people presumably) can be and are reported in Wikipedia articles, just not suppported.
Here, we're a little more relaxed. But the policy is developing as we go along. It's not appropriate to say (for example) that the New Standard Tuning is better than the traditional guitar tuning. It is appropriate to say that Robert Frip thought it was better in 1983. It may be appropriate even to say it's a good tuning for a particular piece of music.
When expessing opinions we tend to an informal and obviously opiniated style. Again, that's a difference to Wikipedia. It seems to work here.
Content
This is the biggie. Wikipedia is very particular about verifiability, and copyright, and notability, and not allowing people to publish their original ideas, research, interpretations, opinions, and lots of other reasons they mightn't want the information you can provide. This is understandable in their context, and given the aims of Wikipedia. And we love Wikipedia!
Here, we care about accuracy, relevance and legality. And that's all. If it's accurate, relevant and legal, then we want it.
So both Wikipedia and TOEOT do care about accuracy, but our ways of seeking it are significantly different. See the Content FAQ for details. Citing TOEOT in Wikipedia, permalinks and the disclaimer page all also have some food for thought on the question of the accuracy or otherwise of this site and others, including Wikipedia.
Scope and size and all that
There are hundreds of books just on six-string guitar tunings. Can this site ever hope to cover so vast a topic?
Yes and no. The goal of having every tuning ever all in our standard format and all nicely indexed so everyone can easily find, identify and understand the tuning they want no matter how little they know about it before coming here is unattainable. We all know that. It's an unattainable ideal whose purpose is that, meantime, we make the site as helpful as possible to as many as possible. Again see the Content FAQ.
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