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I had an interesting discussion with someone who is convinced that a person with a good ear can put a guitar more in tune than someone with a lesser ear and a tuning machine. I didn't agree but this is not my question. What I did admit to being open to is that someone with a good ear can tune a guitar such that it sounds better than what someone with a poor ear can do with a tuning machine. That is, a guitar may be sounding its best when it is not "perfectly" in tune due to other sounds going on other than the specific frequency of on particular note. I'm interested to know if others agree with this notion or not.

Something for a Friday.

Cheers,
Pat

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There are three kinds of people:

Those that make things happen,
those that watch things happen,
and those that wondered what happened.

that´s exactly my take on the subject, and something i too have been commenting with a friend. perfect tuned 4ths and 5ths are OK, but 3rds sound weird to my ears.

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member of the guild of professional dilettantes

I don't really have anything to back it up, but I agree. I can't tune by ear, but I play with a friend who does. His guitar always sounds better than mine, and my guitar is better than his, IMO.

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Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgement.

A tuner is fine, but it has to be one that tempers the tuning. Guitars don't lend themselves to absolute tuning. Most people who use a tuner, will then tweak the guitar a bit to make it right tuning fretted strings to open, octave, harmonics at 12. The problem with tuning totally by ear, is that it can get you in trouble. We did a recording with a guy in our ensemble who had "perfect pitch". He tuned all the guitars. that was all well and good until he was gone and we had to fix something. Tuned with a tuner, and he was off, so we had to figure out how to get tuned to where he was. What a pain. His pitch wasn't near as perfect as it was relational. The guitars sounded great, but were off pitch by enough cents to hear the difference when you used a tuner.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Exactly right, especially with open tunings. Hence the term 'sweetened' tunings. As mentioned, especially with tunings that have thirds or seconds in them.

I have what you might call relatively perfect pitch (meaning i can get close) but my thoughts are this....

every guitar is intonated differently. you can tune them the same way but one or more strings will be off due to the differences. on my breedlove, (and many other guitars i have played) you can tune it perfect but when you play an open D chord, the B string sounds out of tune. on some guitars it might be say the G string.

I have a very critical ear so, so when guitars arent in tune with each other it drives me insane.

Ill take a good ear and no tuner over a bad ear with a tuner anyday!

how many times have you been to an open mic and the person tunes his guitar with a tuner and plays a song thats really out of tune?

how many times have you been to an open mic and the person tunes his guitar with a tuner and plays a song thats really out of tune?

Or, god help you, a recording session?

There seems to be an entire generation of players, who do not know what an in-tune guitar really sounds like. Or care, for that matter. My take, on this: " A tuner will get you into the ballpark, but you still have to be able to find your seats".

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https://soundcloud.com/jeffreylsuits/he ... -runnin-13

Natural string harmonics don't result in good-sounding scales in every key, so things have to be tweaked. There are several ways of doing this. Even players with good ears usually retune a guitar when it goes from one of them to the other. Here's a page that describes some of the physics involved.
http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html

My tuner is not very accurate. It bounces around, and has a wide dead band. I have a rather tin ear, but I can tell when things are really bad. I'm using a Sabine Metrotune MT 9000. If anyone can recommemd a significantly better tuner, I would appreciate it.

Yes, no problem.

A Peterson 490 is what you need.

A well tempered instrument will never be perfectly in tune in all keys and intervals at the same time. It's the nature of the beast, and of the harmonic series composing any scale (and tuning system).
It's all a matter of compromise so that, like a piano, all notes sound tolerably in tune even though most are really out of tune. It means tweaking a bit, especially between the G and B strings.
A strobe tuner won't get you there (I never owned one), training your ear will.

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Laurent Brondel
West Paris, Maine - USA
http://www.laurentbrondel.com/

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Personally, i couldn't do an intonation job (nut and saddle compensation) without my Peterson, but YMMV (and obviously does ...)

I have a tuner, but only use it to set concert pitch or when I'm doing guitar setups.

When playing with other people I always tune to them (unless they're wildly out) and do it by ear then tweak certain strings for certain keys.

Ever tried playing along with some of your favourite old recordings? A tuner will have you miles out!

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http://www.bobmatthewsguitars.co.uk

+1
I just need to hear one note and be told what it is, and then I can match a string to it and tune the rest off that.

Sometimes I can get that low E spot on without a reference, but I have been a semitone or two off in either direction before and snapped a string because of it Haven't given up yet on learning perfect pitch, but not making much progress either. I should do a heavy duty training mission on it sometime.

I've tried tuning a guitar one string at a time referencing a piano or using an electronic guitar tuner, but still always had to tweak it a bit to make a wide variety of chords sound equally close to right.

The lowest note I can sing is a d, so I start tuning a step higher than that. It's not perfect, but I don't break strings. Plus, then people sometimes think I have perfect pitch.

There was a really good article about this very thing written by a well known recording engineer....

The gist of it was that you can never win.... A trained human ear will hear that notes are "Off" even by a teeny bit... and "Equal Temperment" is "Off" by definition.... He talked about the necessity of re-tuning instruments for certain individual riffs and even for single small pieces of songs.... even for individual chords within the song....

And you wonder why songs sound different "In Real Life" than on CD.... It's a wonder that we ever got the first song written....

Thanks

nice trick!

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member of the guild of professional dilettantes

One of the things I find interesting is after 30 years of playing, my guitars never are at standard pitch. For whatever reason, most guitars sound better to me tuned half a fret lower (and sometimes not quite a full half fret, but close). I always tune my guitars to standard tuning when changing strings, and invariably, after a half hour of playing, the guitar is tuned down a bit to where my ears feels it sounds best.

To each his own I guess

Glenn

Seems crazy but I do understand it. When I tune a six string, I always stretch it a little and let the G - B interval be off a little so the other ones are tolerable. If you can get G C A E and D chords to all sound ok, I think you're good. There really is an art to it that a lot of people don't understand. Recently my neighbor has been asking me to come over and tune all the guitars before their jam session.

Don't those True Temperament Necks solve part of this ?

i'm an electronic tuner fan. it may not get you exactly there, but it does bring things very, very close.
from my experience playing with others who prefer to tune by ear, i think that most of what they've taught themselves is hear wrongly, rather than tune correctly. people with perfect pitch withstanding. many of the others have grown used to a guitar that sounds out of tune.

This is a very interesting thread. Thanks!

My few cents worth......

I spent years doing the singer/songwriter small venue circuit. One thing I learned for sure......RETUNE FOR EVERY SONG! If I go from a blues tune in E to a folky tune in G, I invariably had to retune to make it tolerable. I used to arrange my set lists to avoid having to do this too often on stage, so I would group together tunes of similar tonalities. I also found that I would need to retune when moving a capo as well, even if it was of the same chordal structures as the last tune.

Fast forward........I am now a collegiate conductor and director with many years of ensemble experience under my belt. In a top level ensemble, be it orchestral, vocal, or wind/percussion, the players adjust each pitch on the fly. The rules I give my ensemble members are as follows:
1. Tune all octaves perfectly
2. Raise the 3rd of every major chord by a few cents, and lower the 5th of every major chord by a few cents. This gives a major chord a more sonorous tonality.
3. Lower the 3rd of every minor chord by a few cents, and raise the 5th of every minor chord by a few cents. This gives a minor chord a charactersitic dark tonality.
4. In a chord involving more tones than just a triad type of voicing (i.e. dom7, maj7, 9, 13/#11, sus chords, etc.) you must find and tune the natural intervals, preferably the ones of a dominant to tonic relationship (i.e. the perfect fifth between the 3rd and 7th of a minor7 chord).
5. In a chord voicing where steps are closely spaced, or in a cluster, pull the steps away from each other to maximize the intervals. This allows the human ear to distinguish more of the individual tones that make up the cluster.

I think that on guitar you must consider the voicing of each tune. For example, if I go from a tune in E to a tune in G, I usually adjust by slightly raising the b string so it is nice and high for the 3rd in the key of G, and I adjust the g string down a bit to voice the octaves perfectly.

Regarding the studio techniques of pitch shift and correction.... we should resist traditions that cannot be reproduced in a live setting. The danger of the vernacular ear becoming accustomed to "perfected" pitch and doctored music is that it directly influences the way that our own artwork is perceived. It is best to not shoot oneself in the foot, sonically speaking.

A famous story in my neck of the woods came to me from an old boy who had perfect pitch and got a guitar custom built by a local guitar legend (mossman). When he went in and complained to Stuart about some of the intervals being off, Stuart told him not to listen too close.

Love, Peace, and Hair Grease,
Hans

This is one of the situations where one can only speak for ones self. No two individuals hear the same. Tuning is a matter of personal preference. Some people like to hear a G Major chord with the 4ths and 5ths perfect which means the 3rd will not be. Others will prefer to temper the 4ths and 5ths a bit so that the third is sweeter.

I find tuning a guitar to be an endless series of compromises. There are too many variables--your ear, the instrument, the strings, the acoustic space, the way you play--for an electronic tuner to do it for you. It may get you in the ball park, but then it's up to you.

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Kevin Mason
Mason Guitars and Ukuleles on Facebook
http://masonguitars.net

Interesting point about pitch shifts and how it can change the mood of the music. This is probably the reason that orchestra's don't use tuners and use their ears to adjust pitch to blend with entire group.

This being said I always use a strobe tuner when setting up guitars! My reasoning is that it gets the guitar to a consistent setup every time. I have found that if a good quality tuner (many are junk) is used then the guitar if set up properly should sound pretty good. I have often been curious about tempered tunings but a good friend of mine who has been playing a long time tried it out and thought it just didn't sound right. What I gathered from his experience is that a tempered tuned guitar becomes more subjective and while to some it may sound better to others it may not.

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Brad
Avon, OH

IIRC, in the book Musicophilia by Dr. Oliver Saks, a conductor had a stroke. Shortly after that he got very frustrated that the musicians were no longer playing high notes in tune. Someone finally took him to his home piano, and he heard those were out of tune also. Then he realized it was his brain. I believe the problem subsided. Interesting book, also a story about a guy that would have seizures when he heard one type of polka music. The mind is a fascinating thing. After all, we pluck these strings because it produces a feeling in the mind, no ?

Interesting thread going here.
In open tunings, you have to flat the third by a cent or two.
If you listen carefully to each string played boing- boing, say E then A,
you can hear an oscillation between the two notes.
When The oscillation is longest (?) they be dead on.
Tuners are good to get a start, then tweak to your ear.
They are essential when playing in a group in a club!
Why? Because ya can't hear yerseff!