pLt, isn’t that what I said? Except I said it longer, wordier, more confusingly, and cutesier? By the way, Opal, you will sometimes find that you spend the night tuning rather than playing. Almost as bad as being an oboe player.
Now I’ve peeved the oboe players.
BTW Opal, if you have to maintain the sum of human knowledge on that site of yours, when do you have time to play guitar or visit with us? Is it nice to be around guys who aren’t (well, not ALWAYS) trying to get you to undress?
Ok Opal, i’ll give you some advice. I suppose you are getting frustrated trying to get your guitar in standard tuning. Don’t fret dear, there are a few things you can do. A good one which SquirrelCubie mentioned is to get an electronic tuner, they run from $25-$60. They are convienent–I can tune quicker with it than with my ear. But if your strapped on cash get a tuning fork they’re like only a few bucks and get one pitched to 440 Hz–A. And tune the second fattest string to it, and then tune all the other strings from that reference point. It may take you 6 months before you recodnize the sounds of the strings and can tune them to each other by ear alone. Another thing you should do is put some graphite in your nut. You can use liquid graphite from the hardware store or just a pencil. This will help you KEEP your guitar in tune better. Put the graphite in those little grooves where the strings rest in the nut. Tune the guitar every time you pick it up, this is a good habit. Most of all have fun! Just think all the greatest guitar players were at the stage you are at now in you playing at one time.
Adjust your intonation.
Silo said, adjust your intonation. Don’t do that unless you think your guitar is a piece of crap. It could be another problem but it is not likely. Intonation once it is set rarely if ever has to be adjusted. If the guitar is made by a reputable manufacturer don’t ever do it. Crown Prince has to do it to be able to play the guitar left handed. He buys right handed guitars and converts them. If you are having intonation problems and not able to keep the guitar in tune, change your strings. You should change them about once a month with moderate play anyway. When I was in school I would change them once every two weeks. I probably should have changed them every week, but I was a poor college student and couldn’t afford to do that. Anyway, that was with pretty heavy play and practice. You actually said the problem with, “. New strings are fine, strings a few weeks old get worse.” Strings don’t last forever and deteriorate significantly faster with play especially if you are a banger player (ie bangs at the strings rather than gently strumming them). You may also try tuning harmonically with the 5th and 7th frets. If you don’t know how to do it I will outline it below.
Low E 5th fret to A 7th fret harmonics.
A 5th Fret to D 7th fret harmonics.
D 5th Fret to G 7th fret harmonics.
Now here is the tricky part you have two choices:
a) Low E string 7th fret to B 12th fret
Then B 5th fret to High E 7th fret
b) Low E 5th fret to High E open then tune
Then tune High E 7th fret to B 5th fret.
Play a few chords then adjust accordingly if the guitar is still out of tune. It means you weren’t listening close enough when tuning.
I tend to use option b) because it ensures the minor variations don’t pull the high E out of tune.
HUGS!
Sqrl
I like to intentionally detune my guitars when I’m not going to be playing them for a few days. Perhaps I’m crazy, but I tend to think that taking the tension off of them when the tension is not needed is helpful.
On the bright side…Mrs. C. is almost ready to allow me to go get a Stratacoustic. I’m extremely psyched.
I think ren is using an acoustic, because he said string length problems could only be solved with an electric, which I’m assuming he doesn’t have. The problem with a lot of acoustic guitars, is that in low chord positions, the intonation can be spot on, but in high chord positions, it goes to crap, with a lot of dissonance. No way to get around it, unless you want to have a professional cut a compensated bridge saddle, which is staggered, not straight, and reroute your saddle block to accomodate.
I’ve seen $1500 Martins with crappy intonation, and $250 knockoffs that had comp. saddles that would intonate perfectly (but didn’t have that sweet Martin tone, which I would sacrifice my left nut, as well as the intonation, to have).
There are kits that allow you to replace the saddle with a tune-o-matic type bridge w/ adjustable bone saddles, but it still requires rerouting in a lot of cases, and you sacrifice a bit of tone from losing wood around the bridge block.
Mr. Cynical:
I don’t know if the following is true, but since I’ve heard it from a number of techs, it may be: I have been told that de- and re-tuning frequently can increase the rate of neck warpage, requiring frequent screwing around w/ the truss rod (not fun). When the neck is under constant tension, apparently the neck joint is more stable, because it’s not flexing whenever it’s tuned up.
It is recommended to detune when the guitar will be in storage for longer than a few weeks, the guideline being, if it will be in storage from one season to the next (sring to summer, summer to fall, etc.), because the temperature and humidity changes can do goofy things to a neck under tension. Of course, you should also detune when traveling. A neck is much more liable to break when banged around if it is under tension, the headstock area being the worst.
That concludes this session of the guitarists’ public service announcement.
And remember, just say no to overpriced, Floyd Rose equipped, humbucker/single coil/humbucker guitars that are so pointy they could put a friggin’ eye out. Why? Cause I said so.
Crown Prince,
I see exactly where you’re coming from. However, I live in Colorado, where temperature and humidity changes are frequent and extreme. Snow one day, 75 degrees the next. 
Quite. Although I’m not sure it matters for the guitar in question (not a conversion), I also play left handed.
CPoI, SqrlCub, thanks for the feedback (pun intended).
OpalCat, hope I didn’t hijack your thread to badly. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
This may be a slightly odd comment, but I find the act of cleaning, restringing, and setting intonation on a guitar to be an almost spiritual experience. My two remaining instruments are not expensive and rather aged, but when they’re tuned and have the fresh gangling of new strings about them, I have the pleasant sensation of having done something good for the universe. It’s like injecting them with some kind of musical youth serum.
More on subject: best way to learn how to tune is to start with a new set of strings. They’ll be hard to hold to a note at first, but the constant adjustment will get your practice in more quickly, and the sound will be better than of an old stretched-out set.
One other thing, there really is no need to ever play a guitar left-handed. As I have said before, playing a guitar that way is similar to turning a flute around to face the opposite way and then playing it. If you are learning in the classical style then no reputable teacher will teach you that way.
If you insist on playing left handed and are playing a classical/acoustic guitar, the simplest fix to convert it to a left-handed guitar is to flip the bridge nut around. Do not go messing with the actual bridge itself. The luthiers (yes, even the mass produced ones) knew what they were doing to get the tone to come out correctly. If there is excessive string buzz and other such cruddy sounds coming from any of the registers, you can adjust the truss rod (classical guitars usually don’t have this…acoustics do) slightly to decrease the angle of the neck. This will make the chords in the first few positions a little more difficult to play (requires more strength and distance) and will move the strings farther down the neck to a more moderate position rather than being to close. An easier fix is to go and buy a larger bridge nut… you don’t have to move the bridge at all. Sometimes the nut (that is at the top of the neck) gets worn down and will make the first position notes buzz. You can also replace that. Since it requires that you to remove the woodglue with a solvent, I would recommend going to a luthier/repairman to do that simply because the solvent removes the varnish also. That is of course, if you mind the way your guitar looks.
Both of the nut parts cost less than $2 a piece (bought a bridge nut for 35 cents once) and are an easy fix that can be flipped 180 degrees to work on the “left-handed” guitars.
Crown Prince, (don’t take this as an attack…what you say can work. There are some confusion in terms and other things that I will discuss farther down.) I have been playing and fixing guitars for ages. I have a degree in the guitar (I don’t know how long you have been lurking) and at one point made my sole living on teaching and playing the guitar. What you say is correct but the actual need to do any of those things are so remote and potentially extremely damaging to the instrument that I would only suggest it if you paid several thousand dollars for a classical instrument. My good classical guitar is worth about $3500 now and my bad one is between $1000-1500 now. I can’t tell you how many instruments (electrical) that I have seen ruined because people decided to mess with their positionings. Frankly, $1500 for a good guitar is cheap. You would really only be getting a moderate guitar. The next guitar I buy will cost me at least $5000 and I would never dream of doing any re-intoning the instrument for more than one reason. The main one being, the luthier really knows what s/he is doing and in re-intoning the instrument as you suggest, you will more than likely have to have it refretted too. The string length to neck ratio are very specific and take a lot of knowledge of acoustics and skill in luthery to achieve correctly.
You seem to be pretty interested in doing these types of things to the instruments that you own. That is good. Play with cheap instruments and make them better. I would suggest doing a lot of reading on luthery and perhaps go to school for it. The difference between what you think you know now and what you will know afterwards will be so great that you will wonder why and how guitar repairpeople actually make a living selling intonation. That is hardly ever the problem.
Intonation refers more to making the instrument sound and the presence )or lack thereof) of a buzz. Tuning is just that. Intonation is also producing a good clean sound without excessive noise. What you say actually sounds pretty confused. Also, you say, “I’m sloppier than shit, so I intonate pretty sharp to compensate.” You can’t be sloppy and intonate well. It’s like eating mashed potatoes with your hands and not knowing where your head is you will go all over the place and still make a mess. If by intonation you mean playing in tune, that is different and not really the same as intonation. I see where you could get confused with the terms since they have the same rootwords. Most decent guitars will play in tune all the way up the neck. You can buy a $50 Yamaha that will have this feature. The distance between the frets (which btw slowly get smaller up the neck) is what makes this possible. You also have to remember that the guitar like the piano is evenly tempered and will never play in perfect tune like the voice, unfretted strings, and brass instruments do. Prior to Bach’s time, instruments were tuned to an untempered scale and had to be retuned to play in the appropriate keys. Even then, the sharps and flats would either be excessively sharp or flat. In an untempered scale, the notes are sharper going up and flatter going down thus the leading tone scale degree is significantly closer to the tonic going up and significantly close to the submediant going down. In a tempered scale, the note is the same both ways. It has found a midpoint between the two. This is what the guitar does but it is even less even because there are only six strings to play with and you can only adjust so much. The difference in tuning going up the neck has been compensated for and like the piano now plays evenly out of tune with itself. Tubadiva can also explain this as she has gone through the whole musical cycle and knows what I am talking about.
When you tune a guitar, you always tune to the “string length” same as any string instrument. What is this compared to? When you tune a guitar at a fret, you are just changing the string length to make a different note. When you tune a guitar you change the tension of the string to match a certain note which doesn’t ever really change the string length but just makes it tighter. If you mean that, for example, on certain electrical guitars (I have an Ibanez) you can slightly modify the bridge where the strings are held per individual string, then everything you do there can be done at the tuning pegs just not as easily. Those are called fine tuners by the way. Beginning violins, violas, cellos, and upright basses have them because young musicians usually aren’t able to adjust the fine tuning with the tuning pegs for a few years. They are a valuable addition to an orchestral band which are known to play horribly out of tune mostly because of their current untempered incarnation. It makes it much easier to at least have the open strings being in perfect tune with eachother. In that sense I see what you are talking about with string length. It is completely different on an acoustic or classical guitar since they do not have those type of tuning mechanisms. (Flamenco guitars are even different from those two because they have no mechanical tuning mechanisms.) This addressed both You and Ren. He was right about different voicings having an out of tune sound. It is due to the guitars uneven temperment. You have to love frets. The individual strings are all in tune going up the fretboard but as I said earlier it is an instrument, much like the piano that is equally out of tune with itself.
You do have a lot of interesting and useful things to say about electrical guitars. All of the pedal input was interesting and helpful. You were informed correctly that constant detuning/retuning of a guitar can cause neck warpage. It is like folding a piece of paper over and over until it starts to tear apart at the seams.
One last time, Ren, invest in a new nut or simply flip the one you have around. I can’t tell you how many times that stupid thing fell off my guitar when I was first learning to play it and changing strings. I inadvertantly put it on wrong once and had my guitar teacher laughing at me. That was pretty humiliating in its own sense. The tuning problem you can’t really ever overcome. Changing the string lengths only helps fine tune the instrument, it doesn’t change the fact that the frets already and permanently accomodate only a tempered tuning. It is one of the quirks that we have to live with to ensure that our instrument remains more readily playable. Just be happy you don’t play the violin. EEK talk about screech city when you hear your first beginner play. (FTR, it usually takes an average violin player about 5 years to be able to play in tune well…and even then it is bad. I have directed a professional mini-orchestra made up of local symphony members who in the beginning, their first sightreading of a piece made me want to cry. String players are notoriously bad readers and with an instrument that does not have a readily available tuning like the guitar or the piano it is even more horrendous.)
HUGS!
Sqrl
Some are beter than others you know. My luthier happens to do work on Van Halen’s guitar, Joe Perry’s, Al di Mieola’s…just to name a few. I heard some people talking about nuts. The “best” material to use for a nut is ivory (hush!). Ivoriod is good and brass is ok too. BTW, I wouldn’t recommend putting on a nut yourself.
You will never get the intonation on any guitar perfect because of the western scale itself. From time to time I adjust mine so when I play the upper frets the pitch is not shifted (outta tune) relative to the same note 12 frets lower on the same string. If you play with other people a lot try tuning the higher strings a touch sharp and the lower strings a touch flat. You sound will mesh better with the other instruments. Try it.
I am mostly an electric player, but I play acoustic from time to time. If you have “old” strings on your guitar do not tune with 5-7 harmonics method. As the strings deteriorate the harmonics lose accuracy.
I think you’re confusing the neck action with intonation. Then again are you talking about the intonation of the fret tips?
I agree with not tuning with the 5/7 harmonics on older strings. You need to change them for a bit.
I am not confused on intonation. I didn’t take 4 years of lessons in college in addition to many numerous theory, acoustics, history, etc classes for naught. Neck action influences intonation. Intonation is what you do to make sound. You can have good intonation which is caused by good technique with instrumental influence. Intonation is not playing in tune. It deals with it moderately but it deals with the “TONE” not the “TUNING”. Notice the difference? Same root word but completely different meaning.
HUGS!
Sqrl
I should have said that in the first place. In other words, when it comes to guitar repair/mods: Don’t try this at home kids!!!
Sqrl, if we both happen to go to the same SD gathering bring your g-tar, and i’ll bring mine. 