Dave Mudgett
From:
Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee
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Posted 1 Aug 2020 7:02 am |
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I know the original poster just asked a technical question about how to apply the offsets. That question was answered, but since this has veered off in other directions ...
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| The thing that's missed is using your EARS ... |
I totally agree. I have never understood how anybody could play any instrument - and especially a non-fixed-pitch instrument like steel, violin-family, trombone, or many others - without seriously working on developing an ear for relative pitch, intervals, and so on. I don't really care how anybody else tunes. I've heard all sorts of tuning methods work in the hands of someone who can really play. And I really do think that a lot of this depends on playing style. I got into steel originally for the beautiful sustained and Ionian-major/Aeolian-minor dominant tonalities.
Interestingly, long ago when I first started playing guitar, after a bunch of years on piano, I had a hard time getting my guitar to sound really in-tune to me because I was trying to tune it purely via harmonics. In that context, pure harmonic tuning (except true octave harmonics) used with fretted instruments will make a lot of even commonly used chords sound really off. This was long before the days of commonplace electronic tuners, and getting an accurate ET tuning was challenging. The first really good reference I saw to doing that well without an automatic tuner was Hideo Kamimoto's seminal book "Complete Guitar Repair", 1975, pp. 54-64, which goes into all manner of neck/fret setup and tuning. I still have my original copy that I bought when it first came out.
But guitar is also a different beast. I do occasionally tweak my guitar tuning off straight ET if a particular chord sounds a bit off. But that is very limited and generally restricted to very slightly flattening the third of a chord that prominently sounds off in a particular context.
Slide guitar, open E/D or open A/G, I tune to a tuner ET except that I almost always slightly flatten the third of the tuning. I can't go crazy and get the third purely harmonically in tune because I fret behind the slide routinely, which gums up any overall harmonic tuning. Again, a compromise. Before I started fretting behind the slide, I just tuned to pure harmonics after setting the roots, never had a problem at all. |
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