Posted by digitallogic 4 days ago
I probably haven't tuned my guitar to concert tuning for a long time.
I tried rocksmith and often tuned to that otherwise I just keep it in tune with itself and what approximately sounds right to me.
My fingers are too fat for any precision to matter too much. So long as it's in tune with itself intonation is vaguely right and the action is acceptable no one will notice my solo playing in the garage by myself is out of tune are the fifth harmonic.
https://strandbergguitars.com/en-WW/magazine/true-temperamen...
They solve exactly for this issue, and sound amazing in use. The downside is that you are somewhat locked into a given tuning.
Alternatively you can take the approach of guitars with movable frets so you can adjust them per tuning.
https://youtu.be/EZC69A8TsJ8?si=7hUIb7FEKb45eV_L
These are generally used for microtonal playing but can also effectively be true temperament as well.
Guitars with gut frets used to have adjustable positions, which allowed for some mitigation via changing fret positions too
> Let’s begin by describing the issue with standard equal tempered frets; standard fret spacing is calculated from one single piece of information about the guitar, the scale length. This principle ignores that the frequency of a vibrating string is calculated by three factors: the mass of the string, the tension applied and the speaking length. All three of these factors are affected to different degrees each time a string is pressed down on a fret. The only way to correctly compensate for all three of these parameters is to adjust each string-to-fret connection point independently, until each note plays the correct frequency. This issue, which is impossible to solve with standard tempered frets, is what True Temperament solves.
So the true temperament system is compensating for the fact that a thicker string behaves differently when fretted than a thinner string. It still provides a 12 TET system however.
What you are probably thinking of, is a _just intonation_ fretboard, which exists and looks very different: https://projectionsliberantes.ca/en/guitars-tuning-system/
You can see that rather than squiggles, different strings have frets in completely different places.
More information is here https://www.thatguitarlover.com/blog/what-is-true-temperamen...
But this is also why I mention both fret compensation systems in my original post.
I've known a lot of musicians that have used the necks but mainly only while sponsored and none of them prefer them. Big names in the guitar world.
You're better off spending that money on a better-constructed guitar. And lessons.
So many people mistakenly think that gimmicks will make them sound better. TT necks. Fanned frets/multiscale. The right effects chain...
Maybe YOU don’t want it, but it prevents strings from going flabby without needing much heavier gauges. Which does help with a wide range of playing styles and genres.
Unless you also believe that all guitars should have a single scale length or something, and a single neck profile and fingerboard radius. Otherwise if you concede that it comes down to feel+preference then there’s no argument to make against multiscale instruments.
(I wish Firefox on iOS had a "open clean link" option, but I'd wish Mozilla would fix other more important stuff first, like letting me search/open bookmarks from a private tab.)
But, unless you mainly play stacked fourths, why would you make it a requirement? You can, for instance, tune instead to get pure fretted fifths between adjacent strings, and fretted octaves between strings one removed.
The real reason you can't get your guitar in tune is one which makes none of the above matter. Most guitars don't have good intonation. Most acoustic guitars don't have movable saddles to set intonation at the bridge. Electric ones do. For accurate tuning, you need not only compensation at the bridge, but also at the nut.
https://guitarnutcompensation.com/
On my main axe, I installed a small screw next to the nut, right under the G string. Just doing the G string makes a huge difference!
Here is a test: play an open D power chord (open D, A on G string, D on B string) it is very clean. Now release the A to play a 1-4-8 G power chord (open D, open G, D).
On my compensated guitar, both of them are crisply in tune. Without nut intonation, one of the two will have ugly beats. If you tune one, the other goes wonky.
When I first heard how good it is after putting in the compensating screw, I was astonished and at the same time filled with the regret of not having done it decades earlier.
Why the G? The unwound G string on electrics is the most susceptible to bad intonation at the nut, because it undergoes the greatest pitch change when it is fretted. Guitarists like to bend that one for the same reason. Fretting it at the first or second frets makes it go markedly sharp; for that reason we need to shorten the distance between the nut and the first fret to get that sharpened interval back down to a semitone.
This is less of a problem on guitars with a wound G, which has a lot more tension in it to compensate for its weight, and doesn't pitch-bend nearly as easily.
If an ensemble includes instruments that are equal temperament, then the non-fixed-pitched instrumentalists adjust their pitch to sound good with those.
An ensemble consisting only of instruments that can play any interval can change keys by pure intervals.
E.g. switching from the original major key to the relative dominant key can mean changing the root by a pure fifth. In equal temperament, this modulation is done by altering only a single note: sharpening the subdominant. All other notes are from the original scale. If we change key by a pure fifth, that is obviously not so; all notes are detuned off the original scale.
If we change through all the keys along the circle of fifths, perfectly purely, we arrive at the Pythagorean comma: the gap between the destination root and the original.
Another possibility is to progress the roots through the diatonic fifths of the original scale, rather than pure fifths. Like, we start with a pure, just intonated C major, and then change keys through G,D,A,E,B,F#,C#,Ab,Eb,Bb,F back to C using the notes of that pure C major scale, or sharps/flats relative to those. Then we don't run into the Pythagorean comma; but of course all the pure scales we end up using are detuned from C major, and in a different way from following pure fifths.
Yes, it does.
> There's the mathematical fact that we cannot get pure thirds and even fifths in modern equal temperament system.
Those are the pennies that don't matter, if your instrument has dollar problems.
If you don't have good intonation, then you can't even properly get the approximations provided by equal temperament.
With good intonation, compensated on both ends, you have a much better experience making tuning adjustments to get better compromises for the music you are playing.
Guitar intonation that is accurate to 2 cents is very good, I would say above average.
Another way to look at the pitch error in the ET perfect fifth is as a percentage of the pitch, which is about -0.169 %.
Suppose a 1200 Hz tone (quite a high note, somewhere between D6 and D#6) is played together with one that is 0.169 % flat. That flat one will have a frequency of 1198 Hz. The difference is 2 Hz, and so a 2 Hz beat will be heard: two volume swells per second.
Much lower down, at 120 Hz, that will be 0.2 Hz: two volume swells every ten seconds. Basically nothing. It makes no difference to guitar chords played in the first four fret box down by the nut.
The equal temperament error is worse for some other intervals; the ET major third is a percent sharp, or around 13.6 cents, which is a lot. It is pretty jarring, even in lower registers.
That's not what the submitted article is about; tuning in such a way as to fixing the tiny error in the fourths/fifths will not repair the major third.
No, you can’t. If you tune so that octaves with one string between are correct everywhere on the neck, that will force the tuning to be 12 tone equal temperament, and a fifth in 12 TET cannot be a perfect fifth.
If octaves are perfect with one string in between, the in between string can be slightly detuned from equal temperament to provide a clean fifth, free of beats. Then it also provides a clean fourth up to the octave. That's a useful thing that will make certain chords sound good.
The E, D and B strings are turned such that they yield clean octaves (and other equal-temperament intervals).
Then so are the A, G and E.
But these two groups are slightly detuned, so that the fifths are clean from the E to A string, D to G, and B to E.
2. The error between the equal temperament perfect fifth and the pure one (3/2) is just less than 2 cents. So the difference I'm talking about is at the same level of accuracy as that of pretty excellent guitar intonation. The corrections are not simply for equal temperament; they are not separable from the condition of the instrument and its intonation. The given instrument is what it is, and to get those 1-5-8 power chords to sound clean you do whatever you have to.