Tuning - A Comment on Today's That Pedal Show

TeleMaster · January 2023

Nonsense. There are people here who can tune by ear sure, but are they better musicians than everyone who can't? I doubt it. It's not hard to be relatively in tune with your other strings but if you're playing in a band you'll really need a tuner to get to 440hz, I doubt many can perfectly hit it without one.

carlos · January 2023

TeleMaster said:

Nonsense. There are people here who can tune by ear sure, but are they better musicians than everyone who can't? I doubt it. It's not hard to be relatively in tune with your other strings but if you're playing in a band you'll really need a tuner to get to 440hz, I doubt many can perfectly hit it without one.

The worst are the ones who think they can, but aren't, and then won't be convinced they aren't either.

rze99 · January 2023

I use Polytune clip on as you can use it without your rig backstage or whatever and did away with the bulky pedal no regrets

stickyfiddle · January 2023

I"m 100% sure I've seen Kurt tune by ear during live shows. But exactly-perfect tuning isn't that important for grunge she the entire vibe is “not giving a shit”

And I don’t think every single guitarist who can tune by ear is better than everyone who can’t. But I also don’t believe you can be a great musician while not being able to tell when your instrument is out of tune, let alone if you can’t tune it yourself.

DefaultM · January 2023

Played a gig the other day, came on for second set and the other guitarist was way out of tune. 6 songs passed with me thinking he’d realise. My teeth were itching it was so bad. We had a small break for him to pick up his acoustic and I rushed over and said you need to tune your electric before you use it again and he just said ah yeah I know. I genuinely don’t understand how he could bare it.

GuyBoden · January 2023

Intonation is always a compromise on standard guitars, it can never be intune at every fret.

https://www.truetemperament.com/products/necks/

GuyBoden · February 2023

There is always "Just Intonation" if you want to be really "in tune", instead of using the popular equal temperament, which just divides the octave into 12 equal parts.

"In music, just intonation or pure intonation is the tuning of musical intervals as whole number ratios (such as 3:2 or 4:3) of frequencies. An interval tuned in this way is said to be pure, and is called a just interval."

Stuckfast · February 2023

But if you use just intonation, your guitar will only be in tune in one key...

GuyBoden · February 2023

Stuckfast said:

But if you use just intonation, your guitar will only be in tune in one key...

viz · March 2023

It’ll be pretty good in the 4th and 5th keys - especially the 5th because only the dim 5 of that will be out. So if you tune to Just E, then B major will be fine.

But yes.

Rocker · March 2023

roberty said:

@GuyBoden I tried an earvana nut and it sounded wrong to me. Too 'in tune'. It's kind of hard to describe. It didn't sound like a guitar to me any more, although obviously it did sound like a guitar

GuyBoden said:

roberty said:

@GuyBoden I tried an earvana nut and it sounded wrong to me. Too 'in tune'. It's kind of hard to describe. It didn't sound like a guitar to me any more, although obviously it did sound like a guitar

But, them types of nut will only make the open strings be true temperament tuning, the rest of the frets will be gradually out. Sort of misses the point, or is a blatant marketing gimmick.

Your ears and brain have become tuned to out of tune sounds. I fitted an Earvana nut (available from Feline Guitars) on my Les Paul. Initially it sounded slightly wrong but the tuning on the notes a few frets up from the nut was close enough to perfect (as explained on the Feline Guitar website). It took me about two days to reprogram my ear to the slight changes but it happened.

Marketing gimmick? I don’t think so. Would a respected Guitar builder such as Feline use Earvana nuts if they didn’t make their guitars play better? I rest my case.....

Crazed_Fandango · March 2023

The more posts appear on this thread, the more I'm convinced that a tuner is all I need and learning to tune by ear is of no value.

hollywoodrox · March 2023

I could tune to other strings using 4ths it’s just the initial string for a reference , a tone on your phone could be used or another instrument . I like to use my tuners though

stickyfiddle · March 2023

Since we're talking about equal temperament etc, the thing I've always wondered is that all these sweetened tunings and wiggly fret options presumably put you out of tune with other instruments - if keys are equal temperament but you have wiggly frets then you're not going to have exactly the same note at every interval.

Or do these folks only play chuggy rock with other guitarists with wiggly frets?

Tannin · March 2023

stickyfiddle said:

the thing I've always wondered is that all these sweetened tunings and wiggly fret options presumably put you out of tune with other instruments - if keys are equal temperament but you have wiggly frets then you're not going to have exactly the same note at every interval.

Generally speaking, the purpose of intonated nuts and sweetened tunings (and probably wiggle frets also) is not to modify a guitar to play in just rather than equal temperament, it is simply to make it play ordinary everyday equal temperament more accurately.

It is one thing to adjust the intonation so that the guitar plays exactly in tune at the 12th fret, but it is another thing entirely to get it to play in tune in other places, especially on the first three or four frets.

viz · March 2023

Tannin said:

stickyfiddle said:

the thing I've always wondered is that all these sweetened tunings and wiggly fret options presumably put you out of tune with other instruments - if keys are equal temperament but you have wiggly frets then you're not going to have exactly the same note at every interval.

Generally speaking, the purpose of intonated nuts and sweetened tunings (and probably wiggle frets also) is not to modify a guitar to play in just rather than equal temperament, it is simply to make it play ordinary everyday equal temperament more accurately.

It is one thing to adjust the intonation so that the guitar plays exactly in tune at the 12th fret, but it is another thing entirely to get it to play in tune in other places, especially on the first three or four frets.

Yep, TT wiggly frets were originally designed to play Just Intonation or certain common meantone tunings in specific keys. But they were pretty inflexible. Then TT swung towards using wiggly frets to account for the physical properties of string stretching and bending at the lower frets that would otherwise distort equal temperament tunings.

Anyway the only reliable way to get your guitar sounding remotely in tune, without wiggly frets, is to not try and force it to be tuned to Just Intonation and Equal Temperament at the same time. The frets are equally tempered, so the intervals between the strings must be as well. So choose one string and tune all the others to it by fretting. Or tune each string to the fretted equivalent of its neighbour. Then each string will be 1.33484 x the frequency of the one below (2^(1/12))^5). Apart from the B string which will be 1.26x.

That's what a tuning pedal does.

stickyfiddle · March 2023

Ah, ok that's clear. I don't think I've read anything about wiggly frets since they first hit Guitarist about 15 years ago so wasn't aware they've changed tack slightly.

digitalkettle · March 2023

viz said:
...
So choose one string and tune all the others to it...
...

@viz and I posted similar methods for this on page 5:
https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/3463350/#Comment_3463350

Try it! It really does sound more in tune than other basic methods.

marxski · May 2023

I can tune by ear very well. If only fingers moved on the fretboard as competently.

guitarjack66 · June 2023

tone1 said:

I can’t tune by ear….but when I tune to standard 440 my ear just doesn’t like it much…if I tune a few cents sharper it’s much more pleasing?

I was messing around on Ultimate Guitar looking at some songs and an Oasis song required tunning to 455hz,so I tried that and my cheapo guitar and my ear liked that a lot more than 440. This had never previously occurred to me.

Danny1969 · June 2023

A lot of nineties stuff was tracked to tape and mastered to tape. It’s the tape speed variation that leads to the tuning being sharp or flat on these records. This can be annoying when you have a nineties playlist to learn and you have to tweak your tuning constantly to play along.

One thing I’ve practiced again and again is how to get a Strat into tune quickly. I use a Strat for this exercise because raising the pitch of one string makes the rest go flat. So you think of what’s happening mechanically and compensate by going over in pitch on the strings knowing they will come back down on their own as you go across the guitar.

Another thing that’s good practice is flatten a string and then try and compensate when playing by applying more pressure or bending it slightly in the chord shapes.

I watch how some players pick up another players guitar and they instinctively correct little tuning errors and just sound so much more melodic.

So tuners are good but they only get you some of the way there. You will always need a good ear too. A tuner isn’t gonna help you bend accurately in tune or help you intonate chords properly.

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

In this Discussion

Become a Subscriber!

Tuning - A Comment on Today's That Pedal Show

Comments