Guitar tuning…yawn
I’ve been meaning to post a few more rambles dealing with guitar tuning after I did a little piece on guitar detuning.
Tuning a guitar properly can actually be a somewhat complicated thing. And the more I’ve played music the more sensitive I feel my ear is to anything being slightly off key.
Many of us are of course familiar with a few means of tuning, electronic tuners being the most simple and accurate in a dark room. There’s also the method of fretting at the fifth fret to get the tone for the adjacent string, and doing that for each string.
But sometimes these methods sill leave the guitar sounding a little off—an open E major chord might sound fine while an open G major chord sound off. There are good reasons for this—and I’ll discuss it in another post—it all has to do with the impossibility of tuning stringed instruments perfectly to play in all keys—that’s what that whole “Well-Tempered Clavier” thing Bach composed addresses. There are intriguingly historical and metaphysical implications of stringed-instrument tuning as well. So yeah, I’ll write about that next time.
But for now, I’ll talk about a great way to temper the guitar’s tuning so that the little imperfections in pitch are spread evenly across the strings and all keys sound harmonious.
To start, tune the low E string with an electronic tuner. Once in tune, fret a D on the 10th fret of the E string, and tune the open D string to this note. Then fret a G on the D string at the 5th fret—tune the open G string to this. Fret an A on the open G string, and tune the open A to this. Now fret a B at the second fret on the A string, and tune the open B to this note. Lastly, fret an E at the second fret on the D string, and tune the high open E to this.
If you follow this method, and of course have pretty good pitch in your head, your guitar will play pleasingly in all keys—an E major chord and a G major chord should both sound comfortably in tune.
Next post…ancient Greece, Pythagoras, lyres, and music for the fallen.