John, Bill & List: Billbrpt@aol.com wrote: > The guitar's frets are laid out in a manner that would imply ET. All > electronic guitar tuner's frequencies are based on ET. However, many players > will tell you that once they have tuned according to the elctronic tuner, > they play some chords and "tweak" the tuning a bit to suit their own > preferences. Many who do this are essentially converting the ET to a WT. > Guitar frets on all modern guitars that i know of are laid out at a factor of 2^-12, just like an equal tempered piano scale. Because the guitar interface is a 2-dimensional matrix rather than linear and because the intervals are fixed in the dimension along the neck, you can only alter the intervals between the open strings. Any attempt at using other temperaments results in different harmonic results depending upon how you voice any given chord and which form (or "shape") of the chord you use. Very few guitars I have played have perfect intonation, although inharmonicity is low compared to that of pianos because the tension is so much lower and the strings thinner and less stiff. The intonation of any guitar is affected by the choice of strings (why most electrics have compensating bridges), the age of the strings (older strings are less elastic and go sharper when pushed to the fret than do new ones, and have higher inharmonicity) the action height (the higher the string is above the fretboard, the sharper it goes when it it pressed down to the fret) the height of the frets and the technique of the guitarist (how close the finger is to the fret, how far the string is depressed below the crown of the fret, and the amplitude of the vibration (if you watch with a visual aid, you can see that a loud note is sharper than a quiet one, especially in the bass). Any time you tune a guitar, you try to make the best compromise for the piece you are playing, so that as many as possible of the actual intervals to be used will sound tolerable. I have never seen an electronic tuner that will do a satisfactory job on a guitar. I don't know any accomplished guitarists that use them, although I know of some roadies that use them to put stage guitars "in the park" before a performer picks them up, and I know luthiers who keep one on the bench for analytical purposes. I am sure you could store a good average aural tuning for a given performer on a given guitar with a given set of strings of a given age on a SAT. When I tune, I set my open fourths to about 1 beat per second wide, the third between G and B to roughly 8 beats (no, I don't count) make sure my fifth-fret unisons (and 1 fourth fret) are tolerable, check the coincident 3rd and 4th partials of adjacent strings(7th and 5th frets), and the 4th partial of E against open e, and then play a bunch of chords to find any intolerable intervals. And of course, all of this only applies to standard tuning (EADGBe) There are many guitarists using non-standard tunings, a lot of which are tuned to an open chord, or something approaching one (such as DADGad) and in which it is possible to push the tuning (of the open chord) towards "just intonation", since most of the compositions played this way are strongly tied to the home key, and the occasional crunchy excursion is soon satisfyingly resolved. Tim Keenan Terrace, BC
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC