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Comment by nubinetwork | Hacker News Reader

This sounds neat, but I think I owned a tuner for about 6 weeks before I could do it by ear... EADGBe isn't that hard.

Pack it up folks, nubinetwork has exposed the scam that is the guitar tuner industry. You don’t need a guitar tuner if you have ears; all the guitar techs and musicians who use them have bought into a lie. And obviously since guitar tuners are a waste of time, a tech demo showing that you can use the accelerometer in a commodity handheld device to pick up minute vibrations with sufficient accuracy to detect guitar tuning from a web page is just feeding into the hands of Big Tuner.

Seriously, this is the very definition of a shallow dismissal.

If you have a good external reference point. But it's also pretty easy to have your tuning drift quite a bit away from E standard if you solely rely on the strings. Getting a standard tuning is not the same as getting the standard tuning you want, exactly. This is especially true if you play in standard tunings below E, like C or B, where strings can be looser than the norm.

Pro guitar teacher here with over twenty years of experience teaching the guitar, and close to fourty years of experience playing the guitar. I still struggle with properly tuning my instrument by ear. Nothing wrong with my ears. It's just not easy to do this right.

For me it's hard because of tempered tuning, so each string should be slightly out of tune for everything to sound good. If I tuned by ear, I could get two open strings to match, but all the fretted notes and chords wouldn't sound good. On my ukulele I even tune one string down on purpose to make the fretted note sound better. And then there is the inharmonicity of overtones, and some strings have more noticeable overtones that influence how the pitch is perceived.

I can tell if my guitar's significantly out of tune, but no way I'm getting an accurate tune without a tuner.

So what do you do when the lead singer is engaging in some stage banter and you need to tune between songs? IEMs? With what reference pitch?

>IEMs

Absolutely. In orchestral band back in my high school days, between songs I would ask my friend on the tuba to give me a note for reference so I could tune the timpani. If you are in a band you should be able to manage to take a one second note and hold that by humming or something and tune up. I can't even read real music (I was a "percussionist" ie incompetent except at rhythms) and even I could do that. Better trained musicians than I could expand from there to the other notes you need.

You just need a single reference pitch. You can literally just play a sine wave into your headphones for a second on stage, or have your audio engineering guy feed you one. Or you have one of those dirt cheap tuners that clips to the fretboard to get you started.

The lead singer is engaging in stage banter partially to give you the time and space to do this. If your ensemble includes a pianist or a synth, you just have them slap a note for a reference.

A good chunk of us are in tune (pun intended) with our instruments to the point that we can simply feel the vibrations and know where we are with regards to tuning.

I haven't touched a tuner in about half a decade.

That sounds like a very useful skill for a working player. But it seems to come with a couple of significant conditions.

I can believe this is possible. But I don't think this is a reasonable thing as a baseline expectation for a player with 6 weeks of experience, which was the original comment in this thread.

I don't know the details, but I imagine you're feeling beats transmitted through the neck or something. But if that is the case (an assumption) it still requires you to have at least one known-good string, unless you're playing solo.

So, for these circumstances, and others, a pedal-based or clip-on headstock tuner seem like they still have plenty of practical application.

depends on the instrument. with acoustic instruments the resonance chamber is often tuned so that you can feel the body itself vibrating more when you're in tune

I don't doubt that this is true at some level. But is it really perceptible for 20cent differences? I don't know anything about this, but I'd be surprised. I'd say +/- 20 cents is a bare minimum for calling something "tuned", but low single digits is really the goal.

no, i still use an electronic tuner with my acoustic guitar. but i can feel the body vibrating differently when i get close to being in tune vs being a semitone off

Semitone precision is not good enough to replace a tuner. I believed that's what we were talking about. Still cool and interesting though.

It's not hard if E is in tune already. :)

i'm like this at home for sure, until i want to play along to something in tune.

i'm also the one at rehearsal literally throwing TU-3s at my bandmates who don't have tuners on their boards for some reason. you have to have a tuner if you play with others. no question.

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