[SwellJoe]

I've been a guitarist (off and on) for 30+ years, and I'm oddly fascinated by tuning methods and practices.

The best educated guitarist I've ever known (he was an LA studio guy who moved back to my home town to raise his family and was teaching at the high school for fine arts I attended...literally everyone here has heard songs he played on, and probably a few musicians he's taught) used a technique I haven't seen very often, but it's been my favorite method. It's based on chords and the naturally occurring "beating" when intervals in chords are "right". Basically, you're switching back and forth between perfect fourths and fifths across all the strings and finding the best balance between them; when the beating is minimized, your guitar's first position is about as well-tuned as it can possibly be, given the limitations and oddities of intonation on a fretted equal-tempered instrument and the different sizes of strings. This is how I tune, unless I'm going to be playing way up the neck, in which case I tune with an alternate further up the neck to accommodate that position better.

The interesting thing about this, and the thing that always confused people who see me tuning is that overdrive/distortion makes this method work better, not worse. It exacerbates the beating and makes it more clear when you're tuning it right.

James Taylor devised a system that accommodated the way lower strings tend to rise in pitch when strummed aggressively; he'd tune a tiny bit flat on the low strings, getting close to on-the-nose as you went up the strings until the high E was exactly right. You would adjust this method slightly based on gauge of strings and whether the G string is wound or not. In this way strumming hard wouldn't end up sounding sharp on the bottom and out of tune across the instrument. This seems like a pain in the ass, to me, since you need a tuner and to memorize the settings across the neck to get it exactly right, so I have only done it as an experiment. I couldn't hear a positive difference compared to my usual method of tuning with chords (which already accommodates the sharpening of low strings because we're tuning to chord shapes).

A common method I've seen maybe most often, especially among metal guitarists who tune down and bass players is the harmonics method (5th and 7th frets of strings next to each other). This has the benefit of bringing the tuning notes up into a higher register where our hearing is more accurate. Distortion doesn't hinder this method either, so rock guys can do it without changing their amp settings or whatever. But...and this is a big but. This isn't actually a great method for getting good tuning, because it will be the natural harmonics of the strings, which aren't exactly the same as the notes on an equal-tempered instrument. This was the method I used when I was a kid. The traditional fifth fret (and fourth fret) method, that is the first method most guitarists are taught, is still better than this one, because it accounts for equal temperament.

[rwnspace]

I only think I get what you mean by "beating", could you clarify for us/me? I'm thinking of the particularly sonorous pulsing you sometimes get when playing those intervals.

Having played guitar from a really early age I'm pretty lucky to able to get tuning pretty much bang-on from ear, plus some double-checking it still sounds okay further up the neck. The main downside is that the open G string never, ever sounds right.

[SwellJoe]

Do you have a guitar or other stringed instrument handy? I can tell you how to produce beating: Play a perfect fifth (open B string, second fret high E string, for example), and listen as you turn the tuner slightly up and down.

When the fifth is in tune, it will sound uniform. When the interval diverges from a fifth you will begin to hear a pulse, a sort of wobble...slow at first (when very close to the right pitch) and faster as they get further apart (and then, eventually, if you go far enough in any direction the beating will get slow and stop again as you approach another perfect interval).

To visualize it, you can maybe think of sine waves at certain frequency ratios of each other (a fifth is a 3:2 ratio, fourth is 4:3, octave is 2:1; these are the "perfect" intervals that don't audibly beat when played together, and are not considered at all "dissonant"). The phase cancellation between this is regular enough and frequent enough and not complete so we don't perceive it as beating, but as a specific singular sound of its own. Most people aren't hearing two independent notes when hearing these intervals, though people with some training or with perfect/absolute pitch can recognize it for the combination of notes that it is.

But, as they drift out of tune, the phase cancellation happens in a shifting pattern up and down, so you end up with very clearly audible changes; this is called "beating" (at least, that's what I've always called it, and I believe it is the proper term in physics, audio research, and music...pretty much anywhere we talk about the phase of waves, I think?).

Here's a page with some diagrams of the basic idea of what is happening and what you're hearing, as well as audio samples of what it sounds like (it's more complex with the complexity of a guitar's timbre, but the principle is the same): http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm

[philbarr]

It's interesting you mention "beating". I've heard of, but not actually seen in action, a method where a piece of paper is placed on the strings with the guitar on a flat surface. If the guitar is strummed and the paper falls off it is out of tune, if it stays on it is in tune. Now you also need to hold certain notes down whilst you do this. I don't know what they are. And this might be a myth.

[SwellJoe]

I've never heard of this, but it might work on an acoustic guitar. Solid body electric guitars are sonically pretty much dead (maybe if you put the paper on top of the amp or a flat surface near the amp).

I just tested, and the results were inconclusive. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but there was nowhere I could put the paper that would result in movement when out of tune but not in tune. If I put the paper on the sound board with the guitar laying flat on its back, the paper didn't move much in either case; just a little bit of vibration/rattle. If I put it across the strings, it would fall off whether in tune or out (as I would expect, but I figured I'd try all the obvious options).

Perhaps I just don't know the proper chordal incantation, but I assume some combination of fourths and/or fifths or octaves, since those are the ones that will be very consonant/smooth/non-beaty when in tune and will beat very clearly when out of tune even a little bit.

[elektronaut]

For the low B on my 7 string, I get better intonation and tuning results by using power chords up and down the neck with distortion on rather than relying on a tuner. Fretting tension and picking intensity becomes a huge factor with low tension and high string gauges.

[SwellJoe]

Yeah, tuning in fifths makes sense because you're playing in fifths. It also lets you bring it up into a register you can hear clearly (and the beating will be audible even in the lower registers, especially with distortion). The short scale of a guitar makes going really low challenging, and you'll have more of the sharpening due to heavy picking.

When I played metal and tuned the whole guitar down to D or C# (this was before 7 strings were really a thing), I still used the stacked fourths and fifths method of tuning and it worked for that, too. Since you can strum at normal playing intensity when tuning this way, you can accommodate whatever you're normal playing style is.

[sooheon]

I'm intrigued. Any video of this method?

[beat]

There is video of the James Taylor tuning method on YouTube, by James Taylor himself. His way depends on using precise digital tuners for repeatability. I came to similar conclusions years ago, by ear, before discovering his video, and I still do it by ear, because every guitar is a little different. Modern Peterson strobe tuners and some others have "sweetening" modes that produce a similar outcome.

The end result is that the strings get increasingly flat as you go down, with the low E quite flat (like 18 cents or something). I like doing this by ear, because it varies by guitar, and also by tuning - I often use non-standard tunings, and modal tunings want a different sort of sweetening due to the octave and fifth relationships.

[SwellJoe]

I just tried to find a video of it, and couldn't...but, it's hard to search for "tuning guitar with fourths and fifths" because it brings back information about various kinds of tunings for guitar rather than using it as a method for tuning.

It's kinda weird; I assumed it was something common, but now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it that didn't learn it from that same teacher or from me. The professor who taught it to me was a teacher at University of Miami during the Jaco/Metheny era in the early 70s, toured with Bruce Hornsby for a few years, and then worked in LA as a session musician for a couple of decades (he was never famous, but traveled in famous circles), so I assumed he got it from one of those places and that it would be kinda common knowledge.

I should dig into this more, and if it's not common knowledge somewhere I should make a video (and a cult) about it, because it's really the bee's knees, IMHO. It's super fast to use, once you've got good ears for it, and it results in any guitar, even those with poor intonation, being at least playable for basic chords and such in the first position.

It isn't really complicated. You can derive it from first principles of just knowing that fourths and fifths and octaves are perfect intervals, and then just make chord shapes that are all fourths and fifths and octaves of any other note being played and walk them up and down across the strings until you've got no beating (or as little beating as is achievable, if the intonation is poor). By the time you've gone up and down a couple of times, you're pretty well locked in and it sounds great. Even if you don't have an ear for fourths and fifths, you can still use this to "tighten up" the tuning on a guitar by doing the usual fifth fret/fourth fret tuning that every beginner book or class teaches first and following up with this method to come to a reasonable compromise with the intonation of the guitar and the oddities of wound vs unwound strings (the fourth/third or third/second string changeover is always a bit tricky even with a compensated bridge).

Anyway, I'll keep poking at the google to see if I can find this method documented somewhere, and if not, I'll write it up and make a video. It really should be more commonly known/used now that I think of it.

Edit: This Stack Exchange thread includes people who do either fourths or fifths tuning, which is close to what I'm talking about, but they never quite get to stacking up fourths, fifths and octaves in a few chord shapes (which is where, I think, the magic for compensating for intonation problems comes from). https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/3078/what-are-the-...

[mushishi]

If you post a video, please let me know, thank you!