My friends, I hope you will indulge me in a longish excerpt from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr from the Penguin Edition translated as ‘The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr’. It is one of the best descriptions of a musician’s frustration I have read in a long time…
Were the piano only light enough to lift, many are the times I would have cried thus and flung the thing out the window…
I think it’s a beautiful description of one of the idiosyncrasies of the guitar: the fact that it is impossible to get a guitar perfectly in tune with itself, which is an artifact of the way the instrument is constructed and how it is played.
Put simply, the very act of changing the pitch of one string puts it ever-so-slightly out of tune with its neighbors. This is due to the wooden neck, which naturally flexes one way or the other as the strings are tightened or loosened. So let’s say you’re tuning the guitar, starting with the first string. You get that first string tuned perfectly to pitch, and then start on the next string. But as soon as you start adjusting that second string, it changes the overall tension on the neck, which then affects the pitch of all the other strings. So your first string is perfectly tuned, but if you tighten the second string, the overall tension increases and the neck flexes very slightly, with the end result being that an increase in the tension of one string decreases the tension in the other strings. So when you get the second string tuned perfectly to pitch, depending on whether you had to loosen or tighten it to do so, the first, previously-perfect string is now the tiniest bit more sharp or flat (if you tightened the second string, the first string will go flat; if you loosened it the first string will go sharp).
Repeat that six times across the fingerboard, and you’ll see why guitarists tune their instrument, and then they immediately do it again. By the time they get to the sixth string, the first string’s pitch has changed enough to be noticeable.
And that’s just the tuning process. Playing the guitar has its own effect on intonation. Simply pressing the string down to the fingerboard pulls the note a bit sharp, with the degree of sharpness directly related to how far the string needs to be pressed down, which can be different depending on the position on the fingerboard. Since very few chords are played by pressing down all the strings at the same fret, a chord will be out of tune with itself because of different changes in tension caused by each string being pressed down at a different fret.
I can see this being completely maddening to a person who has perfect pitch. For most of us, though, the guitar’s intonation is a compromise we learn to accept.
Nice story, good Minister.
I think you mean “tolerate, grudgingly”. That’s certainly how I feel; damned thing is never in tune.
I believe in “Ellingtonian tuning”, applying the Duke’s maxim that if it sounds good, it is good.
The era of the electronic tuner, with its mathematical precision, has too many musicians - especially us woodwind players - forgetting that the higher you go on a mathematically precise scale, the flatter it tends to sound compared to the lower notes.
I’d think you could dial in different temperaments – equal tempered, meantone, well, just, bad tempered, whatever – into an electronic tuner. I have no idea if my guitar tuner can do this; the documentation was the size of a business card in very small print in not-quite-English. Do other guitarists use temperaments other than standard? Do some tuners support this? Or is it all done by experience and note comparison? I remember the Ministre posting an example of how to do this.
squeegee: Well, sorta. What I do is find the most acceptable compromise on all the open fifths in first position.
Methodology:
I tune each string with the tuner, then I go back and play the ‘D’ open fifth (string#-fret#, so 4-0, 3-2, 2-3) and then the ‘E’ open fifth (4-2, 2-0, 1-0). The 2nd string has to be acceptable as an open string playing the fifth and a fingered string playing the octave. I find that’s the trickiest one to get right. After that, I do the full ‘D’ open fifth (5-0, 4-0, 3-2, 2-3, 1-5) and the full ‘E’ (6-0,5-2, 4-2, 3-4, 2-0, 1-0). The unison 'B’s have got to match acceptably, as well as the two fifths have to sound acceptable. They can’t be true perfect fifths, because the frets are in equal temperament - that’s the compromise we have to accept on fretted instruments. Same procedure for the ‘G’ open fifth (6-3, 5-x, 4-0, 3-0, 2-3, 1-3), ‘C’ open fifth (6-3, 5-3, 4-x, 3-0, 2-1, 1-3) and the ‘A’ open fifth (6-0, 5-0, 4-2, 3-2, 2-5, 1-5). They’re all going to be slightly out, and slightly different from each other, but the trick is to get them so no one of them sounds more out than the others.
I’ve probably told this story before, but that’s life over 40 - I remember working at International Music in high school, and one of my jobs was to tune all the guitars in the store each day, so that even the brain-damaged asshole who sold boom-chicka organs could pick up any guitar and play in tune. We had one twelve string made by F----s that was a piece of firewood that had been ruined when they put varnish on it. Anyway, I remember having to fight that thing every inch of the way - the neck was crappy, the saddle wasn’t quite in the right spot, the nut was tight, and the Pythagorean comma is made that much worse by having the octave strings. I always saved that one for the last because it could take anywhere up to 20 minutes (this was before tuners, mind - there I was with the A440 tuning fork between my teeth to get a reference pitch …and he’s off!) to get that unique position of the tuners that would allow that POS to play acceptably. One day, after a particularly gruesome battle, I had just got it right when the Cro-Magnon organ dude said “No, boy, you got it all wrong - you need to line these things up and then it’ll sound right!”
And with that little witticism, he turned all the tuners so they were parallel with the headstock. It is a testament to my moral strength that he is still alive…
Well, anybody who rates the shawm as the acme of musical expression is probably not the best authority on the subtleties of temperament…
Great post **Le Ministre **- well, great OP and also an unfortunately funny story about wrestling with the 12-string. Is this the same store where you conducted your rigorous experiments in amplifier feedback? 
Not much to add, other than to say that a lot of sounding in tune is in your hands and your relationship to the guitar.
By in your hands, I just mean that we all “grab” chords with our fingers, and either by applying vibrato or just listening and making (what come to be, after long practice) unconscious micro adjustments, you can “pull” the chord into a more resonant temperament.
Picking chords that suit the tone - power chords with a lot of distortion render harmonic overtones, and if try to play more harmonically rich chords in that way you muddy up the tone. By the same token, in Dropped D or just if you play A-shaped barre chords in standard tuning but add the lower 5th note by barring the Low E string, too, instead of muting it - if you have the right kind of distortion it sounds powerful and angry with a bit of harmonic clash; if you play it through a clean rig it just sounds…well, silly and awful.
Using dynamics - you can over-pick the string or over-strum the chord and pull it out of tune. By the same token, if you play a guitar strung with heavy-gauged strings that is designed to be a brighter-sounding guitar, like a Strat or a Tele, you can play with a heavy hand - and by doing so, really get the major harmonics to jump out and resolve together, and dominate over the more complex harmonics that might threaten to muddy your tone. Or, if you are playing a small-bodied, mahogany acoustic guitar, you can finger-pick the strings and each note occupies its own “harmonic pocket” and they stack up into jazz chords easily, but the minute you increase your attack, they jumble together like a rainbow dissolving into muddy brown.
Just thinking out loud here…one of those mornings…
You can’t really do this, because the frets are where they are, and where they are is in equal temperament ratios. Some people have made true temperament guitars (and probably other temperaments, as well) with frets bending all over the place. You can see examples on youtube.
Feiten Tuning and Earvana Compensated Nutsare both altered-temperament scales (okay, I may not have that technically correct - they alter compensation and basic relationships across strings but I don’t know if they establish a different temperament on the guitar - out of my depth). Also, I remember reading in Guitar Player about a guitar with snap-on fretboards (bet the tone is *wonderful *:dubious:) that enables different temperaments and inclusion of semi-tones - even Indian raga-based fretting layouts…patent description here
Wow, that is a very weird looking axe.
Yes, some tuners support this. I have a Peterson tuner (probably an obsolete model, but it looks a lot like the current V-SAM model) that has a number of historical temperaments built in, along with proprietary “sweetened” temperaments for guitar and fretted electric bass. It will also allow the user to create and save his or her own temperaments.
I have found the proprietary “sweetened” temperament to be helpful. It’s not perfect, but it does seem to allow me to play a piece in a given key, and then play another in a different key without having to retune.
I’ve got to bookmark this and try it out. Thanks, Le Ministre!
It would have been great if one of the girls had said “The neck’s warped. Next time don’t screw with the truss rod.”
