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Hello,
I have a question that is maybe a newbie question but there I go.
I know that a guitar cannot be exactly in tune on the whole neck but I'd like to know how "almost" in tune we can expect it to be. What are the unavoidable tradeoffs ?
Obviously when tuning a guitar with a tuner, it should be exactly in tune at fret zero and fret twelve when pressing moderately right behind fret twelve. E should be E on the tuner, A should be A and so on.
But what else can be expected ?
Should we expect the A on fret 5 of a E string to be exactly the A on fret zero of A string ?
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11-19-2013 04:32 AM
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With a great guitar and a great setup, yes, you should be spot on.
Could you tell us the guitar model that has problem and be more specific?
PS. I had a really old solidbody guitar (pretty messed up) that I had to tune at 7th fret!!
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I have always found you can have every string perfectly tuned but then when you play chords some intervals can be little odd sounding... I think it's the nature of the instrument. There is stuff like Buzz Feiten that are supposed to correct that but I am skeptic.
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A guitar is an imperfect instrument. The math doesn't work out at exact intervals for dividing tones but the guitar has regular and equal divisions for all strings. If you get a good tuner and try fretting a string at every interval you'll see it is in the ballpark up and down the neck but nothing is pitch perfect. This is what gives guitar its charm and/or big sound. A book i recently read (Guitar Zero) said that some musicians will tune to a specific fret just to get one specific chord in tune when recording.
If you want to visualize how a perfectly tuned guitar would look check out a true tempered tuning guitar:
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Not an exact answer to your question, but related...
Back when I was a classical student one of my teachers told me that I should tune for each song, to optimize for the key and the chord that you wanted to sound sweetest.
To answer in detail, start reading here, and dig deeper.
Musical Temperament
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@Spiral: does that guitar actually exist? Interesting idea, if it really works... Hard to imagine, though since, for example, to sound in tune, 3rds usually have to be flattened by a few cents, etc. and the guitar doesn't know in advance which notes are going to be 3rds at any point in time... (Hence, kamlapati's comment about tuning for each key/song...)
... but maybe that picture is just a fantasy?
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"How much should a guitar be in tune?"
As close as f***ing possible.
Pretty simple answer.
(I've always wanted one of those T-shirts that say "Tune it or die.")
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Inharmonicity.
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I think you can get a guitar close enough that nobody notices...and that's "close enough."
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Different players hear differently. For example, a lot of bass players own reissues of the '51 Fender Precision Bass, with its two saddles for four strings, and are perfectly happy. I installed a four-saddle bridge on mine because I could hear the poor intonation. At another extreme is a guy I read about in the '70s in Glendale, CA, who built a guitar fretted like the illustration above. He divided each octave into 31 intervals, because to him, a B# and a C were discordant -- and different chords -- in equal temperament.
My daughter gave me a book for Christmas a few years ago, and it's an interesting read: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) by Ross W Duffin. It provides a good overview of the whole issue, even if his particular point of view is expressed in the title.
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I've always dug the Holland session where at 0:25 Wes joked "this is not a perfect instrument. it's never perfectly in tune."
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Earvana nut system is supposed to help. It's like the Buzz Feintin system except that its like a shelf over the fingerboard (G string) but also in line with the nut slot on the finger board (Top E string).
http://www.earvana.com/
Next gizmo purchase for me. Anyone tried this?Last edited by jazzbow; 11-19-2013 at 05:10 PM. Reason: picture inclusion
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I'm very very curious about this too. Sounds too good to be true.
Originally Posted by jazzbow
Earvana nut system is supposed to help. It's like the Buzz Feintin system except that its like a shelf over the fingerboard (G string) but also in line with the nut slot on the finger board (Top E string).
http://www.earvana.com/
Next gizmo purchase for me. Anyone tried this?
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A guitar is indeed an imperfect instrument, but it should be able to intonate very, very well if it's properly set up with good strings. You should be able to get a guitar in tune enough that even people with great ears won't hear it as being "out of tune."
As Jeff says, that's close enough.
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@Jazzbow - but wouldn't that only work for open strings? I think that, as soon as you form a chord, you are essentially making a nut of the frets ahead of where the strings are being stopped, thus negating the intonated nut. I believe this is how it works if I remember my Helmholtz correctly. Perhaps getting a more accurate (compensated) open string tuning makes fretted notes and chords sound more in tune? Is that the theory? I'm not certain I would hear that difference, but maybe so. I think I use finger pressure to compensate if I hear a need, but it might be fairly automatic. I'm curious to hear your experience with this nut.
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The nut determines the length of the tuned string so you are fretting a shorter or longer string with the Earvana. Take the G for example: (in the Earvana photo) if you moved the nut position back to "straight / normal" and all the frets on that string followed suit, those frets would all shift towards the nut like in the True Tempered neck. I'm also not a scientist so my theory could be BS. Originally Posted by ah.clem
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Yeah, that make sense, snake oil perhaps?? Originally Posted by ah.clem
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Yeah, that makes sense too, Emperors new clothes?? Originally Posted by spiral
Ahh, my brain machine hurts now. Originally Posted by spiral
Anyone got any scientific answers??
PT Chris, come back.........
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I got this off the earvana site;
<<Each string behaves differently with regard to sharpening tendency when fretted. There are three related rules which apply here: 1) sharpening from fretting is inversely proportional to pitch (The Pitch Rule). 2) Pitch is proportional to string tension (The Tension Rule); and 3) String tension is proportional to string mass (The String Mass Rule).
The pitch rule tells us that a guitar will display a global tendency to more sharpness as the open string pitch goes down, and the low E string does in fact go sharp more than the high E string. However, the tension rule and the string mass rule also come into play, and we see this especially when we compare the sharpening behavior of the G and D strings. If we were to apply the pitch rule only to G and D, we would expect more sharpening for D than from G. But D in fact sharpens less then G. This is because of the metal winding on D which adds mass. Even though D is lower in pitch than G, it has a higher tension than G and therefore sharpens less. If you want to test this, you can tune your unwound G-string down to D, the string will now sharpen more when fretted at the nut than when it was tuned to G.>>
So pitch, tension and mass effect the fretted note. I can hear the G string in a chord when it's out of pitch and I would tune it from an octave on the A or top E string. There is much to be said for tuning a guitar to a particular song key.
I recently got a Peterson tuner app for my Iphone and find tuning and intonating from it makes chords ring. As I understand it the peterson tuner has sweetened tunings for different string instruments, capos and user presets. This would make it the ideal tuner for a live situation where you can tune the guitar to pre programmed tunings per song if you were to play fully voiced chords. This wouldn't matter though if you were playing 4 to the floor triads tho'
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From their Marketing:
"You have probably noticed that it is nearly impossible to tune your guitar so that the chords in the first 5 frets ring true for any open chords. "
From a Guitar Player review:
"To our ears, the Earvana nut went a long way toward solving most intonation problems, especially those found in the first, second, and third positions. Also, chords played all over the neck seemed sweeter and more piano-like. However, we found this improvement came at the expense of unisons involving fretted notes and open strings. Guitars can never be intonated perfectly, but the Earvana nut provides a marked improvement over the status quo."
So, looks like they are targeting the open sting position chords ("Cowboy" chords?), where a lot of folks play. Interesting that GP make a subjective comment regarding higher position chords sounding "sweeter", but warns about fretted and unfretted unisons (Helmholtz lives another day! <chuckle>).
I think it might come down to those little changes in pressure we all make when we play. But it looks like a sweet conversation starter! Just my opinion.Last edited by ah.clem; 11-20-2013 at 11:40 AM. Reason: Typo and added content.
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All the great guitar players have been (and still are) playing with a standard tuning system, and it poses no problem. Have you ever tought "gee I wish that guitar was in perfect tune !" when listening to Wes, Joe, Kenny, etc... ?
I say just set the intonation at the 12th fret and forget about that.
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+1. Originally Posted by Professor Jones
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But to the OP, the standard Western tuning method of 12-TET temperament differs form just intonation by around +/- 15 cents on some intervals. That's built into the scale, but still no one expects to hear that difference on an octave or a fifth. Some musicians "sweeten" the tuning for certain chords / keys, and yes you can hear the difference if you focus on it. Or you can ignore. If it sounds good, it is good.
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