Microtonal Worlds: My Obsession with Jonny Greenwood's Guitar

For years I thought I knew what a guitar could do. Six strings, twelve semitones per octave, give or take a capo. That assumption slowly collapsed somewhere between a long drive along the Great Ocean Road and a late night in a share house in Fitzroy, where a flatmate played a vinyl copy of Amnesiac and pointed out the strange, drifting chords that refused to sit still. The pitch wasn't just bent. It was bent past the fret, past temperament, into territories I had no vocabulary for. Jonny Greenwood's microtonal guitar work had quietly rearranged the instrument for me, and I have been chasing that feeling of disorientation ever since.

Most guitar obsessives in Australia eventually meet a wall where standard tuning stops feeling wide enough. Maybe you grow up listening to The Avalanches and Jessica Cerro, or you spend enough time in the back rooms of a Melbourne pub watching a player detune between songs, and you start wondering what sits between the frets that everyone skips past. That is roughly where Greenwood's experiments begin, and they open a door that is genuinely hard to close once you have walked through it.

A First Listen That Changed How I Hear Strings

The track that started it for me was "Dollars and Cents," pressed loud through tired speakers on a veranda in Brisbane, with magpies doing their full dawn commentary about five minutes too early. The chords moved, but they did not move the way chords are supposed to move. They sidestepped. They hovered around a centre they kept missing. I remember trying to play them along afterwards and discovering that my fingers, locked into equal temperament for two decades, simply could not reach what Greenwood was implying.

It turned out I was hearing microtones, intervals the standard guitar never visits because the frets position the player in a tidy compromise called twelve-tone equal temperament. Greenwood and his collaborators often work in nineteen- or twenty-four-tone equal divisions of the octave, and the result feels slightly out of phase with the familiar keyboard, slightly out of phase with everything else you have ever trained your ear on. That sensation of being politely mistuned is, I have come to realise, the whole point.

The effect is not cold or academic. On recordings like those around The King of Limbs sessions, the microtonal movement is what gives the music its almost biological pulse. It breathes. It shivers. The strings behave like living objects straining against the pull of the song they are supposed to be serving.

What Microtonal Tuning Actually Means for a Guitarist

Equal temperament divides the octave into twelve equal steps so that a piece in any key sounds roughly the same. It is a glorious compromise and the reason you can roam freely between C major and F sharp minor without retuning. The compromise is that every interval except the octave is slightly mistuned compared to the pure ratios found in physics. Microtonal systems either reduce that compromise through just intonation, or move past twelve entirely, dividing the octave into nineteen, twenty-four, thirty-one, or fifty-three equal steps, each one a finer cut than the last.

For a guitarist, this is awkward territory. The fretboard is built for twelve, and most movable chord shapes assume twelve. To play in nineteen-tone equal temperament, Greenwood has used custom-built instruments, retuned strat-style guitars, and software that pitch-shifts specific strings in real time. The guitar that you and I play never quite catches up. The player has to teach their hands to land in the cracks.

The odd pleasure of listening, then, is hearing phrases that sound both familiar and foreign. It is the harmonic equivalent of reading handwriting that is yours but from a stranger's hand. You recognise the gesture, but the meaning slips slightly.

Radiohead's Harmonic Stretch and the Logic of Discomfort

Radiohead have spent thirty years stretching what a rock band is allowed to do. Greenwood's microtonal choices are a quiet engine behind many of their best moments. On "Everything In Its Right Place" the cyclical chord pattern sounds slightly seasick, and that wobble is the song's emotional weather. On "Harrowdown Hill" the melodic line sharpens and flattens in ways that a standard six-string simply cannot produce without bending strings to breaking.

This is not display work. Greenwood rarely solos in the flashy sense. Instead he treats the guitar as a tuning system under stress, a set of tensions that can be tightened, loosened, or pulled sideways. The Australian audiences who saw Radiohead at Sydney's Qudos Bank Arena or during their long-ago festival visits would have felt it as unease and lift at the same time. The microtones are what give that lift its slightly tilted floor.

The same harmonic logic carries into "Treefingers," into the string writing for the film Bodysong that finally surfaced in expanded form, and into the more recent trio of records where Greenwood treats the studio itself as another microtonal instrument. He isn't trying to impress other musicians, though he does. He is rearranging the listener's sense of where a tune is allowed to live.

From the Sydney Opera House to a Theatre in Hobart

The classical side of Greenwood's practice has filtered into Australia through touring ensembles and broadcasts by the ABC. His scores for Paul Thomas Anderson, Jane Campion, and Terrence Malick travel through festival programmes, and the orchestral fragments sometimes touch the same pitch logic as the guitar work. In a recent retrospective at the Sydney Opera House I watched a string quartet play pieces derived from his Phantom Thread material, and the audience response was that specific hush Australians reserve for anything that flirts with music we suspect we are slightly underqualified to enjoy.

His work for Ondes Martenot, the swooping French proto-synth, slots neatly into the microtonal story because that instrument glides between notes without committing to any. Combined with retuned guitars, it produces textures that feel like weather patterns rather than songs. Tasmanian classical audiences who caught touring programs at the Theatre Royal in Hobart have described the effect as a kind of hovering, half-light. That hovering is something Greenwood has learned to write for as fluently as other composers write for piano.

It is also worth noting how this bleeds into Australian independent music. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard routinely traffic in alternate tunings and microtonal riffs, Nick Cave's recent guitar writing sits in adjacent territory, and a generation of players out of Byron Bay and Fremantle are reaching for prepared guitars and retuned baritones. Greenwood did not start that fire alone, but he certainly keeps fanning it.

The Mechanics of Finding Notes That Shouldn't Exist

What Greenwood actually does on a technical level is less mystical than the results suggest. He uses prepared guitars, sliding capos, and split-saddle designs that allow individual strings to be retuned mid-song. He has experimented with fretless instruments, custom-built baritone guitars, and processing chains that gently pitch-shift single strings while leaving the rest untouched. None of this is secret. Much of it is documented in interviews and the gear lists that quietly circulate among Australian pedalboard obsessives.

The trickier part is the listening: training yourself to hear intervals like the neutral third or the septimal comma as consonant rather than as mistakes. That takes repetition. I spent a whole summer with headphones on a train from Melbourne to Geelong, looping a passage from "Bloom" until the slightly flat third stopped sounding out of tune and started sounding inevitable. Once it clicks, ordinary tuning feels strangely narrow, like a window that only opens halfway.

Records and Pieces Worth Starting With

If this is new ground for you, the most rewarding entry points sit in a small cluster of records and orchestral works rather than scattered across his full discography. Going in this order also helps, since the earlier pieces are the most concise statements of his microtonal thinking and the later ones show how the same instincts reshape an entire film score.

• "Everything In Its Right Place" from Kid A, a short looping study that contains much of his microtonal language in compressed form
• Amnesiac in full, with attention to "Dollars and Cents," "Hunting Bears," and the closer packt like sardines in a crushed tin box
• Junun, his collaborative album with the Rajasthan Express, where Indian classical tuning pushes his fretboard assumptions further still
• The soundtracks for Power of the Dog and Spencer, both of which contain guitar writing that slips between standard and nonstandard intervals
• The live recordings of his orchestral pieces performed by the Australian World Orchestra in 2018, which let you hear his tuning logic through strings and winds
• Colin Greenwood's bass playing on In Rainbows, a useful contrast piece, since the bass often grounds what the guitar destabilises

After a few weeks of this kind of listening, any standard-tuned guitar starts to feel like a polite suggestion rather than a finished statement. That feeling, the sense that the fretboard is only one possible map of the strings, is what Greenwood has been quietly handing listeners for two decades now. Plenty of rooms in suburban Brisbane or a flat in Marrickville will reveal the same wobble on first listen. The trick is letting the wobble sit, the way you would let a strange new flavour sit on the tongue, instead of rushing to identify it.