Tuning by ear - any advice ?

tovo
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Sun Dec 09, 2012 4:21 pm

Ahh Pierre, great question.

I can say with some degree of certainty that in this area I absolutely suck. Not only can I not tune by ear, I constantly fail to notice that my guitar has gone out of tune and have recorded tunes more than once that ended up as train wrecks because of it.

Like you, I can generally work out the chords in a simple tune through trial and error, so I see some hope. I guess it may come with practice.

As far as singing a key..forget it, I wouldn't know where to start. If someone asked me to sing a C I wouldn't have a clue where to start.

Music, for me, is definitely a case of the more I know the more I realise I have no idea about!


michelew
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Sun Dec 09, 2012 9:58 pm

I can tune the guitar relative to itself, so to the correct tuning if I have a reference note. Wouldn't it be nice to have perfect pitch.

I rely not only on the sound but the vibration and the number of beats you hear when to play the two adjacent strings simultaneously (playing the same note of course). The greater the length of time between beats, the closer the notes. When you can't hear a beat, they should be dead on.

I don't tune by ear often. It takes me a while when I do.

I should try the harmonics technique too.

M.


mark
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Mon Dec 10, 2012 5:57 am

I think one of the problems is that electric tuners allow us to never practice tuning, so sometimes it's a skill that never develops.

One thing you could try is to start with an in-tune guitar and then de-tune one string and then try and tune that string.
You can then check how close you are with the electric tuner.


Catman
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Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:26 am

Interesting topic..

Like most of us, I don't have absolute pitch, but I do have relative pitch. Nowadays I use my Snarks most of the time.

In a quiet room and with lots of concentration I can tune a guitar by intervals, using only open strings, to where it sounds as good (to me) as using a headstock tuner, by singing the intervals in my head.

Otherwise (if not snarking) I use a method I learned at guitar camp, where all the strings are tuned relative to the A string (rather than relative to each other), so there is less cumulative error. Of course, when I do this I use the beating that Shel mentioned, and I usually stick my ear right up against the guitar body while tuning so as to best hear the beating. But for some reason this doesn't work as well with my silent guitar...

David


BigBear
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Mon Dec 10, 2012 12:37 pm

Pierre- Good topic. I think what's important is how you are playing. If you are playing by yourself relative pitch is probably okay if all six strings are tuned properly to each other. But if you are playing with others you need much better tuning than that.

Awhile back I read that concert/ orchestra-level musicians have perfect pitch that is accurate to about 6%. That is not really very accurate for most things. If they are good to 6% I hesitate o guess how bad I am. Maybe 20%? 30%?

I like Mark's comment that we never practice tuning because we have tools that are very accurate. Along with that, if we play our guitars in perfect tune we constantly hear the correct notes. That is a form of practice too. I think that's what Dennis was alluding to as well.

Cheers! :cheer:


thereshopeyet
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Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:15 pm

Untuning and tuning strings for the sake of practicing tuning..... is that a good thing to do?
Is it good for the strings?

I mean is it not good practice to check the guitar everytime it's lifted anyway?
Is that not often enough?

I've tried all sorts of ways to hear tuning and retune appropriately.
I'm not too good at it.
It doesn't stop me trying though.

Ultimately, I give it a go and then compare with my electronic tuner.

Everybody doesn't seem to see it as essential now with access to electronic tuners.
Ear tuning is not always accurate (I'm not referring to tuning using your ear but using the ears ability to hear when tuning is correct :silly: )

Still, I'd like the ability, musicians have done it for years and it's been accepted so there must be an acceptable +/- tolerance
or those that have / do tune by ear may in fact good at it?

I'd think it can only be an excellent skill to develop, it must have a knock on effect with respect to recognising music.

:)


dennisg
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Mon Dec 10, 2012 7:03 pm

thereshopeyet wrote:
Ear tuning is not always accurate (I'm not referring to tuning using your ear but using the ears ability to hear when tuning is correct
I think ear tuning is the MOST accurate way of tuning -- if you're good at it. Electronic tuners have two flaws: 1) they have a margin for error (I often notice I have to retune by ear after using an electronic tuner), and 2) relying on them for tuning tends to desensitize one's ear to the tuning process. I only recently started using electronic tuners, and I can already tell my ear isn't as good as it was.


thereshopeyet
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Tue Dec 11, 2012 1:37 pm

TheresHopeYet Wrote:
Everybody doesn't seem to see it as essential now with access to electronic tuners.
Ear tuning is not always accurate (I'm not referring to tuning using your ear but using the ears ability to hear when tuning is correct.
Dennis Wrote:
I think ear tuning is the MOST accurate way of tuning -- if you're good at it. Electronic tuners have two flaws: 1) they have a margin for error (I often notice I have to retune by ear after using an electronic tuner), and 2) relying on them for tuning tends to desensitize one's ear to the tuning process. I only recently started using electronic tuners, and I can already tell my ear isn't as good as it was.
Dennis
Thanks for picking up on this.
When I wrote that, my comment was not based on experience but rather what folk told me when enquiring about tuning methods.
I suppose it depends on how good your set of ears are at hearing.

It's interesting that you have experienced a change since relying on an electronic tuner.
I wonder if this might be because electronic tuners tend to be digital while the ears are analogue devices.

Dermot


Catman
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Wed Dec 12, 2012 4:49 am

Actually, tuning is a very complex issue, especially on fretted instruments.

The "standard" tuning in western music is equal temperament, which means that the intervals are distributed evenly, separated by logarithmically equal distances. Given the frequency of a root note (f[sub]root[/sub]), the frequency of the note i steps up, f[sub]i[/sub], is given by:

f[sub]i[/sub] = f[sub]root[/sub] x 2[sup]i/12[/sup]

and the distance between adjacent steps (semitones) is 100 cents.

This is how the simpler tuners operate.But these intervals are not the necessarily the most harmonically pleasing way to divide up an octave, there are several different ways, each with its own advantages. This means that a guitar tuned to an equal tempered tuner may not always seem to be exactly in tune to the human ear, even if the tuning is accurate to small fractions of cents! (assuming a perfectly intonated guitar and perfect fret locations (owned, of course, by an honest lawyer...:))).

Some of the more expensive tuners (for example, Peterson) are multi-temperament. The temperaments adjustments are usually very specific to types of instruments and tunigs. For example, I have a Peterson headstock tuner with multiple temperaments ("sweeteners"). The only case where I have been able to detect by ear any difference in results between a standard tuner (Snark) and a sweetened tuning is on my 12 string guitar. Interestingly, it has separate sweeteners for the upper and lower strings in each pair. I haven't tried it yet on DADGAD tunings though.

For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tu ... atic_scale

Cheers,
David


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