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Comment by Tomminn | Hacker News Reader

I noticed an interesting resonance just yesterday on my guitar. You can actually tune a guitar by playing, for example, an A note on the E string repeatedly, and moving the tuning pegs on the A string until the A string starts vibrating.

This is kind of hard to do using just the visuals, as you run out of hands unless you play and fret the string with the same hand. But it works really nicely if you try to find the note by ear, and then use visual resonance as confirmation that you're right. Makes tuning pretty fun.

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That'll tune the one string to the other, but not necessarily bring the guitar into tune. This guy goes through a bunch of other combinations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMhrF-LvfUk

Yeah, but that's always the best you can do without an external note. And if there are no external notes around, you could argue it's all that matters;)

Especially since A=440 is arbitrary to begin with.

It starts out arbitrary but becomes useful once everyone agrees with it, like measuring distance in meters- which has gone through several definitions, none of which make much sense in terms of being based on a natural constant and using a nice round numbers as a coefficient.

If four instruments are following the standard and one is a bit flat because "A-440 Hz is arbitrary" then the whole band sounds like a mess.

Sometimes people intentionally want the effect of a guitar that's in tune relative to itself (which provides harmonies and aesthetic value) but not necessarily on the normal scale or relative to other instruments.

I'd always have this argument with the rhythm guitarist of my band on stage. He'd stop and tune by ear to himself by harmonics

1) You're annoying the audience. Stop.

2) You're only tuning to yourself, not the band. Please use your tuning pedal.

But you'll end up with a Pyhtogorean temperament instead of an Equal one.

This is generally true of tuning an instrument. It's how I've always tuned guitar.

In the case of guitar you only need a starting E tone and can figure out the rest by yourself.

In the case of an orchestra or concert band, everyone plays at once during tuning and you use the dissonance as a guide. Once there is no dissonance, everyone is in tune.

This is a very common way to tune a violin but only works if you have a good reference source or excellent pitch.

do you know how to tune using harmonics? if not, learn it, it is accurate and geeky

believe it or not, its not that accurate because of the imperfect tuning ratios of even tempered scale. i think checking 4ths and 5ths of adjacent strings is really the way to go, since those are the ones that sound really bad when out of tune. if you really want to get in to the weeds of tuning on a guitar, martin taylor touches on some more of the complexities here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl3mcHixAKM

Accurate. Too accurate. You end up with your strings in perfect 4ths instead of equal tempered fourths. That’s just under 2 cents off, but if you tuned all adjacent pairs it adds up.

Be careful not to train your ears to hear the difference. Guitars playing chords are maddening collections of compromises and you will find yourself spiraling into sweetened tunings and fiddling with intonation instead of playing and enjoying music. Someday when you are adjusting your microtonal frets between songs, remember I warned you.

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