Show HN: How to Tune a Guitar

I usually use the Fender branded ones because I'm usually putting them in Fender guitars. I've heard good things about Gotoh, Schaller, Planet Waves, Hipshot, and Grover. I'm pretty sure the Fenders are actually just rebrands of one of those manufacturers.

edit: For anyone curious, it seems that Fender American Deluxe's used to come with them and the new American Elite series that replaced the Deluxe's still come with them. I guess they want to keep it as a differentiating feature for their most expensive "modern" guitars. None of their reissue vintage styled guitars come with them, I suppose for authenticity.

You can even buy a $12,000 private stock PRS and it won't come with locking tuners.

edit 2: I've now noticed that the tuners you link to are "Gotoh style" tuners and not actually made by Gotoh. I don't think I would use any tuners made by a name brand I'm not familiar with, locking or not, because they tend to be noticeably lower quality than the bigger brands. There are exceptions, of course.

Also, you can usually solve tuning problems by replacing the bridge and nut with something hard and smooth like Graphtech TUSQ (they call them "self-lubricating", whatever that means).

That's not to say locking tuners are bad, it's just that I don't have problems with tuning on any of my guitars that have decent nuts and decent tuners. I even used to play my Schecter (old 1990 California model Super Strat) without the Floyd Rose nut locks in place because I wanted to be able to switch back and forth between alternate tunings without the hex wrench. No problems with tuning, at all.

For maximum tuning stability, I also put locking tuners on my guitars and lubricate all of the parts where the string touches. This includes the nut, the saddle, and any string trees.

I use a humorous product called Big Bends Nut Sauce but I've heard graphite from a pencil works as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Bends-Nutsauce-Guitar-Lubricant/d...

If you tune downard tonaly, so from an F# and you want an F, the string will more easily fall out of tune. I am not sure what causes this, some interplay between the friction of the peg and the final resting position of the string on the nut being different depending on the direction maybe. By tuning down perhaps you end up relying on some of the friction from the nut which goes away quickly as the string settles to an equal tension on either side of the nut.

I have noticed it's not as much of an issue on carbon nuts or well made nylon/bone nuts.

The big problem with trying to tune a guitar that way is that you're tuning a guitar so it's in tune when you don't press the strings, but then when you actually play it you do press down the strings. Strings 5 and 6 should be tuned slightly flat relative to the first four, the exact amount depends on your play style, but if you don't tune them a bit flat then they'll sound sharp when you're playing. If you haven't tried this yourself you might guess that it's subtle effect, but depending on your play style it can be huge.

The other problem is that the harmonics are actually 2 cents off of an equal tempered fifth, and if you tune six strings that way you'll end up 10 cents off. Your octaves will sound wrong.

This is like "the earth is a sphere", which is mostly right but if you want to be less wrong you have to dive deep.

So...

The instant after a string is plucked, it begins to lose energy. The loss of energy shows up in amplitude (obvious, because the note gradually gets quieter), but also frequency. This is less noticeable, but for heavy strings with low tension (think down-tuned sludge metal) it can be pronounced.

The reason for this is that a vibrating string is constantly bending back and forth. Tension pulls it toward its lowest-energy position in the center. A familiar demonstration of tension is bending a fretted note to increase its pitch. But the same thing happens to a lesser degree whenever the string vibrates. Displace the string left or right and its tension increases.

Strings you consider "better" might exhibit less of this effect. But that depends on both your playing style (how hard do you strike the strings?) and your idea of what a better string is.

"It depends on technique, tension, and string mass" gets you to 95%.

For conventional electric guitars with magnetic pickups, there's an additional force slowing down the string: the magnets in the pickup. These are weird. For one thing, unlike tension, it's not distributed throughout the length of the string, but focused at 1 or a few (for multiple pickups or humbuckers) points. If you imagine the vibrating string as a weight-on-a-string-pendulum, then the effect of the magnetic pickup is like a small mass attached partway up the string. It interferes with the pure sinusoidal motion and gives it a little wobble.

On most guitars, the effect is not noticeable. But some pickups have very strong magnets, or some guitars put them very close to the strings. Then it can be noticed, and guitarists call the effect "wolf tones" and generally they don't like it.

This gets you to 98%.

My point is there's a lot going on. And while a certain brand of strings and/or tuners may work for you, someone else may have an entirely different experience. I get kind of frustrated with the whole guitar "gear" marketing being heavy on hype and light on data, so sorry if I come across as lecturing. My frustration isn't with you, but the context.

What I've been doing is sending a pop-up to users on audio-critical pages (where audio is the entire point of the site) that says "hi, let's get started, you'll hear audio on this page so please adjust your headphones or speakers" and that seems to give the best result. It's also helpful on a page like yours where the sound is quite loud and I found it a bit loud for my headphones. You must also just provide a button that changes the sound volume which would have the same effect, of telling Chrome that the user has interacted with the page.

With a guitar, you can at least still try to correct it by putting your finger down somewhat closer or farther away.

Try tuning a guitar that has a Floyd Rose locking tremelo system. The bridge is floating on a pivot with springs, so the tension of the strings is collectively working against the 2 or 3 large springs on the bridge. So every time you tighten or loosen one string, you're changing the tuning on the other 5! And adjusting intonation is a pain too, because if you finally get the strings all in tune, then when you adjust one string's intonation, it throws off everything again. (And worse, to adjust the intonation on a Floyd Rose, you have to completely loosen the string so you can get to the tiny little hex screw to unlock the intonation adjustment, and the way it's designed you don't really have an easy way of fine-tuning it.)

I just tested, and the results were inconclusive. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but there was nowhere I could put the paper that would result in movement when out of tune but not in tune. If I put the paper on the sound board with the guitar laying flat on its back, the paper didn't move much in either case; just a little bit of vibration/rattle. If I put it across the strings, it would fall off whether in tune or out (as I would expect, but I figured I'd try all the obvious options).

Perhaps I just don't know the proper chordal incantation, but I assume some combination of fourths and/or fifths or octaves, since those are the ones that will be very consonant/smooth/non-beaty when in tune and will beat very clearly when out of tune even a little bit.

When the fifth is in tune, it will sound uniform. When the interval diverges from a fifth you will begin to hear a pulse, a sort of wobble...slow at first (when very close to the right pitch) and faster as they get further apart (and then, eventually, if you go far enough in any direction the beating will get slow and stop again as you approach another perfect interval).

To visualize it, you can maybe think of sine waves at certain frequency ratios of each other (a fifth is a 3:2 ratio, fourth is 4:3, octave is 2:1; these are the "perfect" intervals that don't audibly beat when played together, and are not considered at all "dissonant"). The phase cancellation between this is regular enough and frequent enough and not complete so we don't perceive it as beating, but as a specific singular sound of its own. Most people aren't hearing two independent notes when hearing these intervals, though people with some training or with perfect/absolute pitch can recognize it for the combination of notes that it is.

But, as they drift out of tune, the phase cancellation happens in a shifting pattern up and down, so you end up with very clearly audible changes; this is called "beating" (at least, that's what I've always called it, and I believe it is the proper term in physics, audio research, and music...pretty much anywhere we talk about the phase of waves, I think?).

Here's a page with some diagrams of the basic idea of what is happening and what you're hearing, as well as audio samples of what it sounds like (it's more complex with the complexity of a guitar's timbre, but the principle is the same): http://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/beats.htm

It's kinda weird; I assumed it was something common, but now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it that didn't learn it from that same teacher or from me. The professor who taught it to me was a teacher at University of Miami during the Jaco/Metheny era in the early 70s, toured with Bruce Hornsby for a few years, and then worked in LA as a session musician for a couple of decades (he was never famous, but traveled in famous circles), so I assumed he got it from one of those places and that it would be kinda common knowledge.

I should dig into this more, and if it's not common knowledge somewhere I should make a video (and a cult) about it, because it's really the bee's knees, IMHO. It's super fast to use, once you've got good ears for it, and it results in any guitar, even those with poor intonation, being at least playable for basic chords and such in the first position.

It isn't really complicated. You can derive it from first principles of just knowing that fourths and fifths and octaves are perfect intervals, and then just make chord shapes that are all fourths and fifths and octaves of any other note being played and walk them up and down across the strings until you've got no beating (or as little beating as is achievable, if the intonation is poor). By the time you've gone up and down a couple of times, you're pretty well locked in and it sounds great. Even if you don't have an ear for fourths and fifths, you can still use this to "tighten up" the tuning on a guitar by doing the usual fifth fret/fourth fret tuning that every beginner book or class teaches first and following up with this method to come to a reasonable compromise with the intonation of the guitar and the oddities of wound vs unwound strings (the fourth/third or third/second string changeover is always a bit tricky even with a compensated bridge).

Anyway, I'll keep poking at the google to see if I can find this method documented somewhere, and if not, I'll write it up and make a video. It really should be more commonly known/used now that I think of it.

Edit: This Stack Exchange thread includes people who do either fourths or fifths tuning, which is close to what I'm talking about, but they never quite get to stacking up fourths, fifths and octaves in a few chord shapes (which is where, I think, the magic for compensating for intonation problems comes from). https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/3078/what-are-the-...

The end result is that the strings get increasingly flat as you go down, with the low E quite flat (like 18 cents or something). I like doing this by ear, because it varies by guitar, and also by tuning - I often use non-standard tunings, and modal tunings want a different sort of sweetening due to the octave and fifth relationships.

When I played metal and tuned the whole guitar down to D or C# (this was before 7 strings were really a thing), I still used the stacked fourths and fifths method of tuning and it worked for that, too. Since you can strum at normal playing intensity when tuning this way, you can accommodate whatever you're normal playing style is.

Went to firefox instead and was able to go through it. Again, very cool. =)

    options.context = new window.AudioContext();

After which point, it was cool. =)