On Using a Tuner and Tuning

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.