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On Using a Tuner and Tuning

Posted by Isaac Greene on

It is time to get something off my chest. I am a tuning iconoclast. A Snark non-conformist. A planet waves denier.

I noticed something about my students quite a long time ago. The ones with tuners clipped to their guitars very rarely sounded more in tune than students that didn’t. Often, a student would go through each string, staring at the tiny screen all the way, then begin playing sounding terribly out of tune. They would generally not stop to retune.

“Does the tuner say you are in tune?” I would ask. As often as not, they hadn’t actually tuned in a way that the tuner even said was in tune. Why not? They couldn’t hear the difference. Why couldn’t they hear it? They weren’t listening, and they weren’t listening because they had a tuner. When you put a tuner on your instrument you outsource the most important thing about you as a musician: your ear.

Other than tuning one string to standard pitch, I would submit you should never* use a tuner (see exceptions in footnote 1). I have two reasons for this:

  1. You will never develop your ear if you always use a tuner.
  2. Tuners do a bad job of making your guitar sound in tune.

Reason one is self-evident. You do not develop things you don’t use. I would like to know the history of how tuners became accepted for professional-level classical guitarists. They are the only musicians I have ever seen use a digital tuner on stage. For many of them there is one permanently affixed to their instrument somewhere, like a bionic extension of their musicality. I expect this is because nearly every other instrumentalist plays in an orchestra or band and tunes as a group regularly. (Then there are pianists, but let that go.)

I have sat in guitar quartets made entirely of graduate students that could not get four guitars in tune with each other, even with tuners. This can only be a lack of developing the ear.

The second point is more complex. Our electronic tuners use a specific frequency (Herz) associated with each chromatic pitch using A440Hz as the starting point (some of the better ones allow you to adjust your A reference in case you are part of the concert pitch wars or play an absurdity like the arch-lute). But how do the programmers decide which frequency each pitch should be? 12TET – Twelve-tone Equal Temperament.

An explanation of historic tuning systems is beyond me, and a wonderful rundown has already been made in this excellent post by Ethan Hein. For guitar specific applications, see this post on why it is impossible to tune your guitar.

If you use a digital tuner you accept as dogma that 12TET is the best way to tune the six strings of your guitar to result in the best sound. I submit that it is not. (In fact 12TET is a perfect example of how the modern mind likes to work. Simplify something until it seems irreducible and ignore all the unfortunate outcomes and issues underlying it until most people (even most musicians) are completely oblivious to the very existence of underlying issues and unfortunate outcomes. Any solution is self-evident if you ignore enough evidence).

How then should a guitar be tuned? The short answer is “so it sounds good.” Here is the process that gives me a result I have learned to live with.

Warning: significant guitar/acoustics jargon in the following.

I get my low E from a pitch pipe app on my phone. I tune the 5th string by matching its 7th fret harmonic (3rd partial) to the 5th string harmonic on the 6th string. Now, people will tell you this is not a good way to tune because 3rd partials are sharp compared to 5ths in 12TET (indeed, the very thoughtful Stephen Aron says exactly this. I also appreciate his thoughts on the Digital Tuner.) This is true by about two cents. By my ear, two cents is well within an acceptable margin of error.

This is also a wonderful example of begging the question. It assumes we want equal-tempered 5ths. I do not. I want the most glorious acoustically perfect fifths possible. If I wanted 12TET fifths I would play the piano. But back to the tuning of guitars…

To make sure things are where I want them, I compare the open low E to the 2nd fret B on the 5th string. This fifth is quite low in pitch, but you can still hear when it is nice and pure.

I tune the 4th string just like the 5th. 5th fret harmonic on A compared to 7th fret harmonic on D. I fine tune it by comparing the E on the 2nd fret of the 4th string to the low E. We should now have a relatively pure fifth and octave for our bass strings. This is where things get fussy.

Leaving the third string for last, I now tune the second string open to the 6th string 7th harmonic. I listen for the purest unison possible with no beats. I play it against the open E string as well (octave+fifth) and the B on the fifth string (octave) to fine tune. When I do this the 2nd string reads quite sharp on a tuner, about 7 cents. But it sounds good!

I tune the 1st string like the 2nd, but in relation to the 5th string. I can now compare it to the open 6th E and the open 5th A, and the E on the 4th string for a double octave, octave+fifth, and octave. When I get it where all of those notes sound as in tune as I can get them my 1st string usually reads about 10 cents sharp. This is quite a bit!

When I realized that’s how I was tuning (the treble strings just always sounded flat when “correct” with a tuner) I thought I was losing it or had really messed up my ear somehow. Then, I bought a piano and started researching how to tune it. That’s when I learned about stretched tuning. Piano tuners have always been compensating for some of the difficulties of real-world tuning by stretching the octaves slightly as they go up the keyboard. There it is! I’m not crazy. It’s a short article, but here is the pertinent quote:

“If the interval is a double octave [like the 6th string to 1st string on guitar], exactly matching the upper note to the fourth harmonic of the lower [which would be the 5th fret harmonic on the 6th string] complicates the tuning of that upper note with the one an octave below it.

Solving such dilemmas is at the heart of precise tuning by ear, and all solutions involve some stretching of the higher notes upward and the lower notes downward from their theoretical frequencies. In shorter pianos the wire stiffness in the bass register is proportionately high and therefore causes greater stretch.”

Guitar strings are about the length of those in small upright pianos (though they are under much less tension). Reading this finally cracked the code for me of why my ear was telling me one thing and the tuner another. I have trusted my ears ever since.

That leaves the 3rd string. I get the best results tuning it to the open A string using the 2nd fret A for an octave. I basically want the 3rd string to be as in tune with the bass string octaves (G, A, and B) as possible and it usually works pretty well in the middle of full chords. It is the string most open to tempering for key. Getting a standard E chord and C chord to both sound passable means you are about where you want to be.

Convoluted as this may sound, it is the best I’ve been able to do to get a rich sound where my treble strings don’t sound flat. I should also just note that being in tune and playing in tune are different things. You will always have to overcome tuning oddities on the guitar, but that is why you develop your ear in the first place. If you can hear the problems you can fix them.

Footnote 1: The one time you should use a tuner is in a pit band or orchestra when you need to stay closely enough tuned silently, or while the rest of the band is tuning. Then by all means, a tuner’s results will be acceptable in this situation since your ear is unavailable.

Footnote 2: Google “James Taylor Tuning” for a plethora of articles on how he tunes his guitar. His solution is accounting for a few more things than mine (including capos), but interestingly his 2nd string is about 7 cents flat compared to the 6th and 1st about 11 cents flat. Further vindication.

Music

Glowing Encounters With the Past

Posted by Isaac Greene on

I am not one to get much from the lyrics of songs. There are songs I have listened to hundreds of times and I don’t have the slightest idea what the lyrics are about or even what they are for the most part, it’s just part of the music. When musical processes are happening language ones aren’t. I am amazed when I meet people who think of songs as a poem with musical accompaniment. I do not understand that.

This is why it’s surprising that some of the words I’ve been thinking about for over a year are from a song. In the narrative song “Tangled up in Blue” Bob Dylan presents this scene after the protagonist heads him with a strange woman:

She took down a book of poems and I began to read
Written by an Italian poet of the 13th century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul
From me to you
Tangled up in blue.

True to form, this is the only part of the extensive lyrics that I know or understand. This stanza stuck in my mind after a few listens and has been with me ever since. They describe so perfectly an experience of encountering the past that has happened to me and still happens on occasion. It’s something I am almost constantly seeking, though I never thought to describe it before Dylan did it for me.

It’s when you are reading an old book, or walking through the 17th century wing of an art museum, and among all the other portraits and lines one arrests you. It speaks directly to you, and you wonder how it came alive. Why does it glow brighter than the rest?

I am a haphazard reader of poetry at best, but I made my way through an entire volume of George Herbert a few years ago. I could read for days without this encounter, then one day, unexpectedly, a poem would grab me by the throat.

Most of my encounters with the past have been through music, but they are of two different kinds. The interpretive work of another musician will show you something you never heard before. What a great gift, to be able to quicken a dead page of notes in the ears of another. But sometimes, when I work hard at it or sometimes at random, it will happen through the musical score.

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on being an ear-driven musician. A musical score is a curious thing. In many disciplines the cultural artifact is received as it is. We have a painting, a chair, a sculpture. It inhabits its own space and is its very self. The work surrounding it is curatorial (putting it in a context to be appreciated) and critical, commenting on it in relation to itself, it’s contemporaries, and it’s cultural tradition. Other than restorative work, you don’t do much with the thing itself besides careful observation.

Music (in notation) and drama require realization. The received artifact is a set of instructions, not the thing itself. To be of any interest, this must be done interpretively.

In his musings of the enduring quality of Bach the pianist Jeremy Denk says this about the musical score:

A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed—but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time.

Embedded here is the idea that the fullest enjoyment of music is through individual interpretation. Making the music as it if were written on your soul and writing it on your own soul in the process.

This is why I continue to play old music. It’s also the standard I bring to old music. If it doesn’t burn and I can’t make it pour off the page like it’s my own then perhaps it should stay in the past. It at least doesn’t belong in my repertoire.

Of all the old music this comes easiest with Bach. That’s why his music is such a mainstay for me. Just below the surface it is ready for a renewal. I have been playing the D Minor violin partita (BWV 1004) for almost four years solid now. I cannot imagine getting bored with it. Just today I thought of something new in the minor arpeggio section of the Chaconne. This happens regularly after hundreds of hours of study and practice. This music is like a campfire ember clouded over with ash; the slightest stir and its glow is renewed.

We don’t always know what’s written on our souls. We’re like the ring of power. It has a message but it has faded from view until the fire makes it glow again. It’s not always obvious when a piece of music will come to life either. Some require a lot of work. The spark isn’t easy to find. Sometimes an inspiration I’ve heard in another performer seems flat and lifeless in my hands. But when the combination of text and performance come together, an old Italian from the 13th century might show you something you needed to say and give you the words to say it.