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Post by leeknight on Oct 30, 2012 9:16:47 GMT -5
(Strangley enoug, the embedding seems to work intermittently. As does the link itself. Something's wrong on their end) This absolutely smokes and thought it might be of interest to you all here. I saw it at Gearslutz and thought, "Well that’s pretty cool." Excellent stuff. There is a whole series with James teaching you that is just excellent, but the one that grabbed me was the one on tuning. How he tunes his acoustic to get that James Taylor sound. It’s totally pragmatic and not what I was expecting form him. What a cool, smart guy. So he says, in order to tune like him you’re going to need a tuner that shows + and – cents. Because he gets very specific, per string. Cool. I don’t have a tuner that does cents. didn't. But I do have a new iPhone and I’ve been hearing about those wacky apps and all. GuiTune (free) The thing tunes better that any tuner I’ve ever used. Bar none. Now. There is a Peterson Strobe app for 25 bucks and I might just, but something about the mic in the iPhone and the accurate tuner, it is a total winning combo. So far, I'm happier than I've ever been with GuiTune. So Jim T (I call ‘im Jim), they blow up a tuner on the screen (it really isn't that big but at first looks looks like a huge freaking tuner) and he walks you through it. If you’re aching to know, E -3 B -6 G -4 D -8 A -10 E -12 It works. Tyler’s Little Martin (my current acoustic “go to”) just sings and strangely enough, there is a Jim like quality to the sound. _\m/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2xnXArjPts |
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Post by bee3 on Oct 30, 2012 11:36:09 GMT -5
I read an interesting book recently that described James' early career... never realized he was a big heroin junky. I've always thought of him as a clean-cut (older) man.
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Post by bee3 on Oct 30, 2012 11:43:29 GMT -5
Really interesting... I've never considered doing such a thing.
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Post by oswlek on Oct 30, 2012 11:45:35 GMT -5
This is fascinating, and equally interesting is that I've actually been doing much the same thing when I correct an electronic tuner by ear. I almost always have to correct the low E and B strings down, never understood why until now.
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Post by shadowsofbirds on Oct 30, 2012 12:06:27 GMT -5
I second the "interesting" of it. Will have to try it for a while.
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Post by oldgitplayer on Oct 30, 2012 19:39:40 GMT -5
I've always tuned by ear off a single reference note, but last year I purchased my 1st electronic tuner in order to be 100% the same as anybody else I play with.
But the electronic tuner is just a 1st reference point because I find each of my guitars needs to be tuned minutely differently for the intonation to remain true between the 1st and 12th frets.
I usually tune an A chord at the 5th fret so that any miniscule changes in intonation are distributed in both directions on the fingerboard.
In short - I find a combination of individual note tuning and chordal tuning yields the best result.
This may achieve the same as what James Taylor is doing - but I'm not sure.
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blue2blue
New Member
The Bard of Bitterness, Denial & Regret
Posts: 43
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Post by blue2blue on Nov 1, 2012 12:54:47 GMT -5
I read an interesting book recently that described James' early career... never realized he was a big heroin junky. I've always thought of him as a clean-cut (older) man. No, he was a troubled youth. While, these days, I generally ignore the tawdry human side of the music equation, back in the late 60s, it was still an info- seeking, rather than info- filtering culture, and I absorbed what I could find on my musical faves. His first big hit, "Fire and Rain," (off his second album) was written about a friend of his who committed suicide while they were both institutionalized. (The reference to 'flying machines on the ground' referred to JT's early band, The Flying Machine.) ___________________________
With regard to JT's 'sweetened tuning,' well, you know, the best tuning on a well-intonated guitar (and, of course, that is the crux of it) is straight, standard ET tuning -- assuming you do not always play in a given key and use limited or no modulation in your music.
If the latter, let's say you always play in G, don't modulate, and basically use primary chords, 'sweetening' your tuning may work out for you -- but you'll have to retune for different keys if you don't want 'sweetness' in one key to turn into sourness in another.
The problem, of course, is that 12 Tone Equal Temperament comprises a set of compromises -- but those compromises are precisely what allow us to change keys and modulate without descending into the gnarly dimension of what were once called 'wolf-tones.' (Intonations 'sweetened' for one key produce ugly dissonances if one switches keys without tinkering the tuning to the new key.)
Of course, all that above is in a perfect world where guitars are capable of perfect 12 TET intonation and metal strings don't exhibit the inharmonicity that makes them produce 'incorrect' pitches as the scale shortens.
This is because of a tendancy for wire based strings or resonators (as in metal tined electric pianos) to have higher upper harmonics than their fundamental. A steel bottom E string may have its fundamental tuned smack on -- but the harmonic overtones will tend to be slightly higher than expected because of the way vibration travels in a metal wire.
So, in order to accommodate that phenom, in a stretch tuning, you tune the instrument's higher tones in order to have less conflict with the more easily audible pitches of the low strings' overtones, rather than the fundamental. (Notice that JT tunes his low strings lower.)
Non-wire based strings are subject to far less of this inharmonicity.
So-called 'stretch tunings' arose on both pianos and guitars in order to partially accommodate this aspect of metal strings -- and the slanted bridge is an expression of this fundamental principle.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
And, then, of course, different instruments often have their own peculiarities. You can adjust for those peculiarities in different ways, particularly if you are tuning to sweeten a particular set of chords, to some extent, but, frequently you are robbing Peter to pay Paul -- if you modulate or even play one of the color chords, you may find that tinkering to sweeten the primary tones has pushed other necessary tones farther out of tune.
PS... on Android I use the gStrings tuner. (Ad-driven or pay.) I find it to be an excellent tuner. (For some reason it seems to be even better on my Nexus 7 tablet.) It has a large number of intonation, stretch tuning, and processing algorithm options, allowing the user to adjust it for best operation with a wide variety of instruments. I get the best results with my steel-strung 000 tuning smack to the ET values as reported by the tuner.
That said, after developing my own highly idiosyncratic single-reference (tuning fork) approach to tuning that mostly served me pretty well for years, I finally figured out the right way to do fret-stopped relative tuning.
I used to let the fretted reference tone ring and tune to that while it rang, a two handed operation. But, particularly with my supernaturally resonant 000, I finally figured out that that approach was producing a harmonic gumbo of sympathetic resonances that was really confusing my ear.
So what I do now is fret and play the reference string tone -- commit that to short term aural memory -- kill all resonance on the guitar while holding the memory of the reference pitch -- and then tune the target string to the memory of the tone.
That might sound like a bit of a roundabout, but it's the closes thing I've found to tuning my acoustic to a reference tone over headphones (which prevents the guitar from going resonant).
PPS... when I tune to my tuner app, I make a point of damping all the strings but the target string so that it doesn't fire up the others and potentially confuse the tuner. |
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