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I've been a guitarist (off and on) for 30+ years, and I'm oddly fascinated by tuning methods and practices. The best educated guitarist I've ever known (he was

I've been a guitarist (off and on) for 30+ years, and I'm oddly fascinated by tuning methods and practices. The best educated guitarist I've ever known (he was an LA studio guy who moved back to my home town to raise his family and was teaching at the high school for fine arts I attended...literally everyone here has heard songs he played on, and probably a few musicians he's taught) used a technique I haven't seen very often, but it's been my favorite method. It's based on chords and the naturally occurring "beating" when intervals in chords are "right". Basically, you're switching back and forth between perfect fourths and fifths across all the strings and finding the best balance between them; when the beating is minimized, your guitar's first position is about as well-tuned as it can possibly be, given the limitations and oddities of intonation on a fretted equal-tempered instrument and the different sizes of strings. This is how I tune, unless I'm going to be playing way up the neck, in which case I tune with an alternate further up the neck to accommodate that position better. The interesting thing about this, and the thing that always confused people who see me tuning is that overdrive/distortion makes this method work better, not worse. It exacerbates the beating and makes it more clear when you're tuning it right. James Taylor devised a system that accommodated the way lower strings tend to rise in pitch when strummed aggressively; he'd tune a tiny bit flat on the low strings, getting close to on-the-nose as you went up the strings until the high E was exactly right. You would adjust this method slightly based on gauge of strings and whether the G string is wound or not. In this way strumming hard wouldn't end up sounding sharp on the bottom and out of tune across the instrument. This seems like a pain in the ass, to me, since you need a tuner and to memorize the settings across the neck to get it exactly right, so I have only done it as an experiment. I couldn't hear a positive difference compared to my usual method of tuning with chords (which already accommodates the sharpening of low strings because we're tuning to chord shapes). A common method I've seen maybe most often, especially among metal guitarists who tune down and bass players is the harmonics method (5th and 7th frets of strings next to each other). This has the benefit of bringing the tuning notes up into a higher register where our hearing is more accurate. Distortion doesn't hinder this method either, so rock guys can do it without changing their amp settings or whatever. But...and this is a big but. This isn't actually a great method for getting good tuning, because it will be the natural harmonics of the strings, which aren't exactly the same as the notes on an equal-tempered instrument. This was the method I used when I was a kid. The traditional fifth fret (and fourth fret) method, that is the first method most guitarists are taught, is still better than this one, because it accounts for equal temperament.

philbarr 9y ago
It's interesting you mention "beating". I've heard of, but not actually seen in action, a method where a piece of paper is placed on the strings with the guitar on a flat surface. If the guitar is strummed and the paper falls off it is out of tune, if it stays on it is in tune. Now you also need to hold certain notes down whilst you do this. I don't know what they are. And this might be a myth.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  I've never heard of this, but it might work on an acoustic guitar. Solid body electric guitars are sonically pretty much dead (maybe if you put the paper on top of the amp or a flat surface near the amp). I just tested, and the results were inconclusive. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but there was nowhere I could put the paper that would result in movement when out of tune but not in tune. If I put the paper on the sound board with the guitar laying flat on its back, the paper didn't move much in either case; just a little bit of vibration/rattle. If I put it across the strings, it would fall off whether in tune or out (as I would expect, but I figured I'd try all the obvious options). Perhaps I just don't know the proper chordal incantation, but I assume some combination of fourths and/or fifths or octaves, since those are the ones that will be very consonant/smooth/non-beaty when in tune and will beat very clearly when out of tune even a little bit.
rwnspace 9y ago
I only think I get what you mean by "beating", could you clarify for us/me? I'm thinking of the particularly sonorous pulsing you sometimes get when playing those intervals. Having played guitar from a really early age I'm pretty lucky to able to get tuning pretty much bang-on from ear, plus some double-checking it still sounds okay further up the neck. The main downside is that the open G string never, ever sounds right.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Do you have a guitar or other stringed instrument handy? I can tell you how to produce beating: Play a perfect fifth (open B string, second fret high E string, for example), and listen as you turn the tuner slightly up and down. When the fifth is in tune, it will sound uniform. When the interval diverges from a fifth you will begin to hear a pulse, a sort of wobble...slow at first (when very close to the right pitch) and faster as they get further apart (and then, eventually, if you go far enough in any direction the beating will get slow and stop again as you approach another perfect interval). To visualize it, you can maybe think of sine waves at certain frequency ratios of each other (a fifth is a 3:2 ratio, fourth is 4:3, octave is 2:1; these are the "perfect" intervals that don't audibly beat when played together, and are not considered at all "dissonant"). The phase cancellation between this is regular enough and frequent enough and not complete so we don't perceive it as beating, but as a specific singular sound of its own. Most people aren't hearing two independent notes when hearing these intervals, though people with some training or with perfect/absolute pitch can recognize it for the combination of notes that it is. But, as they drift out of tune, the phase cancellation happens in a shifting pattern up and down, so you end up with very clearly audible changes; this is called "beating" (at least, that's what I've always called it, and I believe it is the proper term in physics, audio research, and music...pretty much anywhere we talk about the phase of waves, I think?). Here's a page with some diagrams of the basic idea of what is happening and what you're hearing, as well as audio samples of what it sounds like (it's more complex with the complexity of a guitar's timbre, but the principle is the same): http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm

philbarr 9y ago

It's interesting you mention "beating". I've heard of, but not actually seen in action, a method where a piece of paper is placed on the strings with the guitar on a flat surface. If the guitar is strummed and the paper falls off it is out of tune, if it stays on it is in tune. Now you also need to hold certain notes down whilst you do this. I don't know what they are. And this might be a myth.

SwellJoe 9y ago
I've never heard of this, but it might work on an acoustic guitar. Solid body electric guitars are sonically pretty much dead (maybe if you put the paper on top of the amp or a flat surface near the amp). I just tested, and the results were inconclusive. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but there was nowhere I could put the paper that would result in movement when out of tune but not in tune. If I put the paper on the sound board with the guitar laying flat on its back, the paper didn't move much in either case; just a little bit of vibration/rattle. If I put it across the strings, it would fall off whether in tune or out (as I would expect, but I figured I'd try all the obvious options). Perhaps I just don't know the proper chordal incantation, but I assume some combination of fourths and/or fifths or octaves, since those are the ones that will be very consonant/smooth/non-beaty when in tune and will beat very clearly when out of tune even a little bit.

rwnspace 9y ago

I only think I get what you mean by "beating", could you clarify for us/me? I'm thinking of the particularly sonorous pulsing you sometimes get when playing those intervals. Having played guitar from a really early age I'm pretty lucky to able to get tuning pretty much bang-on from ear, plus some double-checking it still sounds okay further up the neck. The main downside is that the open G string never, ever sounds right.

SwellJoe 9y ago
Do you have a guitar or other stringed instrument handy? I can tell you how to produce beating: Play a perfect fifth (open B string, second fret high E string, for example), and listen as you turn the tuner slightly up and down. When the fifth is in tune, it will sound uniform. When the interval diverges from a fifth you will begin to hear a pulse, a sort of wobble...slow at first (when very close to the right pitch) and faster as they get further apart (and then, eventually, if you go far enough in any direction the beating will get slow and stop again as you approach another perfect interval). To visualize it, you can maybe think of sine waves at certain frequency ratios of each other (a fifth is a 3:2 ratio, fourth is 4:3, octave is 2:1; these are the "perfect" intervals that don't audibly beat when played together, and are not considered at all "dissonant"). The phase cancellation between this is regular enough and frequent enough and not complete so we don't perceive it as beating, but as a specific singular sound of its own. Most people aren't hearing two independent notes when hearing these intervals, though people with some training or with perfect/absolute pitch can recognize it for the combination of notes that it is. But, as they drift out of tune, the phase cancellation happens in a shifting pattern up and down, so you end up with very clearly audible changes; this is called "beating" (at least, that's what I've always called it, and I believe it is the proper term in physics, audio research, and music...pretty much anywhere we talk about the phase of waves, I think?). Here's a page with some diagrams of the basic idea of what is happening and what you're hearing, as well as audio samples of what it sounds like (it's more complex with the complexity of a guitar's timbre, but the principle is the same): http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm