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Tuning you guitar and staying in tune | |
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When you start playing an instrument, like guitar, bass or any other instrument that allows tuning, the first thing you probably do is tune the instrument. If you don't you are either very lucky it didn't go out of tune or you don't hear the difference, or don't care too much about little differences. You can just play your instrument and be happy with it but when you want to progress in playing your instrument or want to record you might want to tune it a little better. This article should give you some ideas of how to tune your instrument and how to get better and more perfect recordings.
A guitar is one of the instruments that goes out of tune easily. Even if it is tuned properly the guitar tends to be far from perfect unlike for example a keyboard, which always has the same tuning with the same note. Each time you play a certain note on your guitar or bass your finger has maybe a different angel, a different pressure on the string and a different speed and force at which you hit the string with your right hand. Of course this gives a guitar its special sound and character which set it apart from other instruments but with all these variables involved you also will make many different little "mistakes" which if they are not small enough can make the guitar sound out of tune or at least some notes.
An other important issue when playing an instrument is that if you want to progress, playing your instrument, is that you have to start developing a good ear for notes and tuning. Many times you will start hearing this better when you play a good guitar and tune as good as can be achieved. Just trying to tune right is a very good way of practicing your ears and should open a whole new world of notes, harmonics and the way notes interact with each other.
If you play with a different guitarist or bass player or other instruments you might notice that when playing on certain parts on the neck it just doesn't seem to sound right together. Many times this can be a combination of different guitars and the way the intonation changes over the neck. This effect becomes worse when for example one guitar's tones are a little higher when played with a chord high on the neck and the other sounds a little lower when playing the same chord. The same can happen when you play on other instruments and their tuning in certain frequency ranges is a little off.
So what can you do about it? Just tuning your strings with your tuner might not be enough. But there are ways to get it to sound better.
For a tuning device I personally like the ones that use an analog style needle, for precision, and auto detection of the notes played and preferably a chromatic one. If you play acoustic instruments you also might look for one that has a build in microphone if you want to tune acoustic instruments. With such a tuner you can play also other notes on your guitar or bass and see how good the intonation is.
Just for testing a little you can play different notes and see how well the notes are and watch your tuning device display them. What you should notice is that not all notes are perfect. If for instance you press very hard the note should be too high. Also the force you use to hit the note can influence the pitch, especially the first seconds of the note.
If you play a lot with palm muting try using lots of it and see and hear what happens to the chords. They can all be much too high. This gets worse most of the time when you use low tension strings and dropped tunings.
You can tune you strings as perfect as you want but still your guitar or bass may sound horrible out of tune when you play it. The reason for this might be that your strings are tuned properly but when pressing your finger on a fret the notes are a little out of tune. This might be either caused by you pressing down the string too hard or your instrument is not set up right.
This is where intonation comes into play. Every string on your instrument has its own length which you should be able to see at the place where strings are attached to body. Here you will probably see that you can set each string so it has its own length and height. Because each string has its own weight it also has its own characteristics. This means that if you want to use it on something like an instrument with frets you need to set the length of each to let the string have the right pitch at each fret.
An easy way most people test this is playing a note at the 12th fret and compare it to the natural harmonic at the 12th fret. These notes should be the same. If they are not you need to adjust the length of the string to get it right. This should ensure that your instrument should be good enough to play on and you should hear that the instrument is in tune all over the fretboard. But..
Intonation depends on your guitar and the way the frets are set up on it. It also depends a little on your playing style. If you want to get a good intonation you should try to listen to all the notes you play on the string and setup the length of the strings, the height of the strings and the neck all to that position so that the notes are all good enough. Only listening to the twelfth fret might not be good enough for some or even most guitars. It also depends on what you play on the guitar. If you only play up to the twelfth fret there's really no use in trying to get the upper frets to sound right. You probably would be much happier if the lower part would be more in tune.
Now that you have a good intonation on your guitar what happens if you change strings to a different set with a different gauge? Since your intonation depends on the string gauge you will need to listen and test if you need to adjust. Most of the time you should have to adjust just a little.
Some people or maybe even most people just tune their instrument using a tuner and they are ready to record. When they have tuned their instrument right and have a good intonation of their instrument this will probably work very well. But if you either are not satisfied with it or simply have a guitar that is not that perfect as your ears are, or the part of the recording needs it to be, you will need some more tuning to get the recording right.
Now that you now a little about tuning and intonation you might want to tune the right way. Lets assume you don't have the perfect guitar or are a perfectionist. One way is to start of with just tuning your instrument with your tuner. If you are recording or playing certain notes or chords in a song then play those chords and listen if you hear interactions between certain notes in the chord which don't sound right to you. For instance the first thing that you might hear are the octaves in chords like in an open C (c and higher c, c and g). Try to adjust some strings a little to enhance the chords without altering the other chords too much so that all the chords sound good.
You can also do this with certain solo's just play the notes and watch your chromatic tuner move with the notes you play. If some are not right just adjust a little so that the overall solo sounds as good as you can get it.
With this kind of technique you are tuning your instrument to sound good overall instead of just good on the open strings when you tune the strings. Instead of tuning your b string to perfect b on your tuner and excepting that your c played on the b string is too high you now tune your b a little lower so that the c played on your b-string is also just a little higher instead of much higher.
If you are getting a little better at this you wont probably need a tuner anymore after you did the string tuning. You then will tune your strings with the tuner and adjust the chords and notes by ear to get them to sound right.
Of course this is not all. It gets far more complicated as soon as other instruments get involved. But it works kind of the same way. Just tune your instrument the best you can and adjust when it doesn't sound right.
If you have to record a part where you only will use a certain part of the neck there is not much sense in setting the intonation to be good all over the neck. Just as you can set the tuning for certain parts of the guitar you can do the same with guitars that are only used for certain tasks. So if you have a guitar which you only use for the the lower notes there is really no need to set the intonation for the higher part of the neck.
Now that know how you can set your guitar or bass pretty much to sound good when you play or record how about acoustic guitars? As you might have noticed on acoustic guitars you can't really set string length. You can of course start cutting both bridge and nut and hope you get it right but for this you need quite some experience and if you don't feel comfortable with it don't do it!
The thing you can do when you buy a guitar is start testing the intonation. And be sure to get one that you think is good enough for the job. If you already have one you still can improve it a little by using a different string gauge. If you know how to set the neck and height fo your strings you can also set the distance between neck a little different to get the intonation better but this of course might be a lot harder to play or gives you a guitar with the strings hitting the fretboard every time you hit the strings.