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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

As a non-guitarist but one-time musician, why are guitar tuners needed? Other stringed instruments seem to not need them, and I never thought to ask.

(Obviously you might need an absolute reference if you don't have absolute pitch)

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With guitar you are much more likely to have to re-tune during a performance. I can think of a couple of reasons.

Steel core strings (on guitar) have a much higher coefficient of thermal expansion than gut-core strings (on orchestra instruments). If you start a concert at dusk your guitar will go quite a bit sharp if you have a cool breeze blowing across the stage after the sun sets.

Some of the playing styles require large bends or use of a tremelo which is much more likely to throw some of your strings out during a performance. Having a pedal means you can quickly re-tune between songs without having to blast it over the PA.

Also at an orchestra it is expected that the crowd will be relatively quiet so that the musicians can hear their instruments while they are tuning. At a rock concert you will have a tough time hearing your instrument while tuning, and you don't necessarily want to subject the crowd to your tuning noise over the PA.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I should add - most other string instruments aren't fretted so the musician has the opportunity to correctly intonate a slightly off-pitch string. The frets on guitar means the strings have to be perfectly tuned unless you can bend them in (which isn't really a standard skill)

Actually gut strings are horribly unstable, but are virtually obsolete, having been supplanted by steel and synthetic cores. But orchestral musicians have learned to discreetly tune when they notice that their instrument has drifted out of tune. But like you say, being able to hear yourself helps. The same instruments in a quieter setting are often tuned by ear.

>, why are guitar tuners needed? Other stringed instruments seem to not need them,

I love how that innocent question reveals how a popular phrase for objects (i.e. "guitar tuner" instead of "violin tuner") alters public perception. It hides that fact that other stringed instruments like harps/violins do use outside aids (electronics, smartphone apps, or websites[1].)

Some observations:

- guitars are more common than violins, so the tuning object that's more common is ... the "guitar tuner"

- other stringed instrument musicians like harp and violin players also use so-called "guitar tuners" or metronomes that generates a reference pitch A440. Plenty of Youtube tutorials showing harpists/violinists how to use guitar tuners.

- formal vs informal cultural background of the instrument: the "orchestral" instruments like violin have a more formal structure (school ensembles) so you often end up in a situation where a student violinist has no idea how to tune their instrument because "my music teacher always did it for me". Likewise, piano players pay "piano tuners" to tune their instruments. On the other hand, guitars are more of a "folk" instrument (home playing, campfires, self-taught, etc) so guitar players have more a DIY attitude for tuning from the start.

[1] https://violinspiration.com/free-online-violin-tuner-with-mi...

I also heard that professional musicians - guitarists as well - can tune their instrument by ear.

Pianos need regular tuning too, done by experts - they change tone depending on weather, temperature and humidity as well, so they have to be in a stable environment if at all possible. But these people can mostly tune them by ear, or they will have a tune fork for the base tone (A I believe) and work from there.

Yeah 95% or more will need a tuning fork at a minimum to give a frame of reference. It is fairly common for strings accompanied by a piano to ask for a note from the piano to start from (G for violin say)

In the case of ensembles with a piano, I've heard it's because you can't retune the piano in the minutes before the performance. So it makes no sense for musicians to tune to a fork (or using an electric tuner) and leave the piano out of tune, so they all take the key tone from the piano

Tuning a guitar (or other stringed instrument) so that the strings are more or less in tune with each other is a really basic skill that even very amateur players can mostly do. Being able to tune to an absolute pitch without any kind of reference is kind of freakishly rare.

This. Use harmonics after getting the A from an external source.

Orchestras tune up to the concert master, usually one of the violinists. So everyone gets to tune one of their strings to the pitch of the one string of the concert master. Almost all of the strings in an orchestra (excepting things like guitar, banjo, lute, sitar) have 4 strings (violin family), with the frequency intervals (ratio of frequencies) between adjacent strings being usually a perfect fifth, or perfect fourth (e.g. string bases) which is the inverse ratio to that of a perfect fifth.

So if I have a violin in my mitt, and I tune my A string to an A from the lead violinist, to put my instrument into tune, I must get the E string to be a perfect fifth above the A, the D string to be a perfect fifth below the A, and the G string to be a perfect fifth below the D. The perfect fifth relationship has the higher string vibrating three times for each two times the lower string vibrates, plus a tiny adjustment to get the frequency ratios of the twelve half-steps in an octave all equal. The adjustment is very small (about 0.11%), you could tune a violin with the fifths all exactly 3 to 2 so that, e.g., the google tuner could still show all four strings as in tune. And the 3 to 2 ratio is about the easiest interval less than an octave to do by ear. So most violinists, cellists, etc with good ears do fine without tuners.

The guitar has an interval of a major third between the G and B strings. The integer ratio of frequencies for this interval is usually given as 5 / 4, but the adjustment to even out the steps in the octave is larger, about 0.79%, and you cannot tune the other notes on a guitar at showtime by moving the frets around, so tuning the guitar (and other fretted instruments) is more like tuning a piano than tuning a violin or cello.

Have to say, there's something really satisfying about an orchestra tuning before a concert. If everyone's tuned in, everything starts to resonate together which is when you know they're in tune.

My (guitar, hohner) trem will still drop the strings off the fretboard, and can raise the tuning up about a 4th. Add lights in a show, over time..something might drift - or, in a jam (as in session) with no keyboards - the bass may drift out and you have to retune. Happy to say, my strings are >15 years old! Dinged and dented, and very bent (fretwear), i refuse to change them only on principle. After all that, i have a piezo tuner, my pedals have tuners, but i much prefer (in a live situation, especially) using a my ears over a machine - an 'on' snaredrum will soon get those beats beating.

All string instruments need regular tuning, but with things like violin, more emphasis is put during lessons on being able to tune your instrument fully off of hearing a single reference pitch

Perhaps because it's a necessary orchestral skill. They play an A and everybody tunes their instruments to it, producing that awesome wash of sound you get before a concert. For the violin you tune the A string and tune the others by hearing the open fifths between them.

For a guitar it's easier because you have frets, so you can play the fretted note on one string that should have the same pitch as the next (open) string up, then you just need to compare two pitches that should be equal, rather than hear an interval. (I'm not a guitarist so I don't know if that's considered a good technique.)

Perhaps it's just not considered such an important skill in the small groups people typically play the guitar in.

It's usually not a good idea to tune a guitar as you described. Basically a guitar has to use "temperate tuning" because it has frets, so you can't be absolutely in tune everywhere, but you can minimize the error on each position. So if you tune string by string relying on fretting the last string, you will "carry" the error, and the resulting tuning will be wrong. It is good for a first pass, but you then want to check that some specific positions do sound good. Depending on what you are playing (for example if you rely more on some open chord position), you might even want to tune the open string to make those position sound especially good (at the expense of some less common one). That is commonly referred to as "sweetened tuning".

EDIT: I might have confused things indeed. If you fret, you should not carry the error. Usually, an practical way to tune two string is to play harmonics and listen to the "beats" between them. That will carry the error. Fretting should work, but in practice does not really because that suppose that your intonation is perfect (ie the fret are perfectly placed), which they usually are not, especially on acoustics with no easy way to set it up.

That's very interesting. The tuning for a violin is always (afaik) to make the open strings a perfect 3/2 fifth apart, but then of course you can play to whatever tuning you want. (If you have the skill to do that - I certainly don't!)

That makes tuning a guitar a much more complex thing in principle, with choices and trade-offs to be made, so maybe that's a better explanation for the prevalence of tuners.

I say "always" (for the violin), but that has problems itself. Eg. If you're playing with an equal temperament (eg piano) accompaniment your open G will not match it and there's no other way to play that note. Presumably advanced violinists have to choose their own tradeoffs, but I was always taught to hear the fifth and would always be aiming for a just fifth (tuning an equal tempered fifth by ear would be a neat trick!).

Edit: Hmmm, thinking about it the guitar should be easier to tune to equal temperament (if that's what you want) as presumably the frets are equal-temperament semitones apart. For that tuning, it's the violinist who's "carrying the error".

> presumably the frets are equal-temperament semitones apart

Guitars are made of wood, which bends (both the neck and the top) as one adjusts the tension of the strings. As the neck bends, the length of the string between the bridge and nut changes, and the height of the strings above the fingerboard varies in quite a complex way along the neck, changing the amount of tension added by pushing the string down to hold it against the fret. Similar changes in frequency occur as frets and fretboard wear down a little, increasing the distance needed to properly fret a string.

The neck and top will warp and bend with age, with changes in temperature and humidity. And after a guitar has been played a while, it will have been worked over by one or more guitar technicians. There are so many variables that nothing can be taken for granted. Using accurate electronic tuners is presumably the simplest and fastest way for guitarists to maintain respectable pitch in most musical presentations.

Guitars have a neck tension rod with an adjustment screw that changes the neck bow. They also have intonation adjustment screws that adjust the location of the tail bridge for each string individually. Then there's still tail bridge string height adjustment.

Neck adjustment needs to be done because seasonal moisture changes can change the bow of the neck. Depends on guitar. This is mostly for proper playing action, so strings don't buzz but aren't too high from the fret board either.

Intonation needs to be changed when you change some other things, like the things mentioned above or string gauge for example. There a tuner is very handy, you can compare the string fretted on the twelvth fret to its harmonic there. The differences are small and hard to hear.

Same things apply for electric basses.

Don't know how things are dealt with on a violin or cello, but the lack of frets certainly makes some of the adjustments unneeded.

With guitar, you only adjust these things when doing maintenance, not in the back room and certainly not on stage.

On the cello (and viola) three perfect 3:2 ("pythagorian") fifths down from the A string makes for a low C that's noticeably flat when compared to equal-tempered instruments. For string quartet playing, it's manageable, because the violins will adjust when necessary, but for piano-accompanied playing, cellists will raise the low C a little so it doesn't clash with the C's on the piano.

With violins - or other fretless instruments - isn't it also that they're a bit more forgiving if they're slightly out of tune? I did gather that violinists do the vibrato / wiggling on purpose because, it being fretless, they can't hit the exact note.

You can do without, but it is useful, if you aren't that good at tuning by ear. My electro-acoustic guitar has a tuner built into it. I wouldn't call myself a musician, the precision of my hearing is dubious and since I practice rarely, I tend to use it each time.

Otherwise I'd spend 5 minutes each time trying to get it sound right and then redoing it after playing something, because I didn't get it fully right and I realise it once I play something I'm familiar with.

Because tuning by ear is difficult and playing the guitar can be fun even if you're not musically talented enough to tune the instrument.

Another issue is that guitars are often played in a amplified live setting. You want to be able to adjust your tuning while the rest of the band is playing or other noise is present, and you don't want the audience or others to hear you tuning (so you can't hear it yourself either).

I can tune my guitar relatively but I can not for the life of me tune it with from an external reference pitch like a piano key. I use a tuner if I need to be in tune with other instruments.

Yeah on stage, the 'playing in a very loud setting with all the band preparing' thing, or between tunes or (useful) to just cut my sound, avoid feedback or other stage shit. https://www.boss.info/us/products/tu-3/ is a Workhorse.

Go to any place with a piano that is not used by professionals. Some places (here, at least) have public pianos, like train stations.

Press any of the keys and the same key on a different octave, together. For instance, Do and Do. Do you hear that slow oscillation of the sound going up and down? That is because the piano is not in perfect tune. If you were to try that on a concert piano before the show, the sound would be perfectly stable.

Piano tuning cost something like $100+.

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