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Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

ethanhein.com

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Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#141

Post by tshaddox »

jMyles wrote: post #114
post-it wrote: post #28

> If you watch slow-motion video of a guitar string vibrating, you’ll see a complex, evolving blend of squiggles. These squiggles are the mathematical sum of all of the string’s different harmonics. This is incorrect. If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. A real slowmo camera will correctly show the entire string vibrating[1]. The rest of the articl…

> If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. ...is this correct? You can say this about any oscillating phenomenon - that doesn't mean it's not 'real'. The "squiggles" are an artifact of the frequency of the string and the scan rate of the rolling shutter. You'll also see artifacting from a global shutter camera, where the "squiggles" will be an artifact…

Every pixel of every frame was really captured by the camera from the source, but it’s being played back to you very differently than how the source actually looked.

The most obvious example of this would be the wagon-wheel effect, where a spoked wheel can appear to rotate at a different speed and direction than its true rotation when captured by a camera under certain conditions.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#142

Post by sfink »

mauvehaus wrote: post #125
rectang wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to singers, adaptive tuning is something which happens naturally for fretless stringed instruments (violin, etc), brass instruments with slides (most prominently the slide trombone but in fact many (most?) others), woodwind instruments where the pitch can be bent like saxophone, and so on. I used to play fretless bass in a garage hip hop troupe that played with heavily manipulated samples that were all ov…

Played trombone many years ago, but never well enough to ever adjust that finely (at least not consciously?). The tuning slide on the third valve on a trumpet usually has a finger fork/loop so that it can be tuned in realtime. I believe the first valve on higher end trumpets similarly has a thumb fork for the same reason.

I played trombone in high school, never very well, but I definitely adjusted like this. Actually, although it was a slide trombone, I'm talking about adjusting automatically with embouchure. Someone would play the reference note, I'd match (in 1st position) but bend my pitch to match. The band teacher once complimented me on the adjustment. Which was stupid, because (1) I wasn't doing it intentionally, and (2) the adjustment only lasted during tuning; as soon as we started playing, I was right back out of tune. I never did learn to suppress the adjustment so I could actually fix the tuning.

But with the way I played, I'm not even sure how much it mattered. The best tool for enhancing my playing would've been a mute. (And it would have been most effective lodged in my windpipe.)

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#144

Post by Underphil »

Nition wrote: post #86

The other problem I always notice on top of all this is that when you pluck a string, it adds tension to it temporarily, so the pitch when you first play it is a little higher than the pitch as it settles down. The louder you play it, the more the effect.

In heavy metal, especially in modern down-tuned genres, this is often used as an artistic choice.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#145

Post by jval43 »

kgwxd wrote: post #40
sgarrity wrote: post #3

My first guitar teacher told me that someday I'd start to notice that you can't get all strings perfectly in tune. At that point, he said, you'll know you're getting somewhere on the guitar.

Get obsessed over the perfect tuning. Blame the imperfections on the quality of the guitar. Don't play until you get a better guitar. Repeat until you give up. Then actually start playing the damn thing.

Yes exactly. Although I didn't buy a new guitar, but a dozen tuners. It finally clicked when I got one that was "real time" enough to see how the tuning shifts from high to low. This was before smartphones could do it.

Doesn't help that most tuners are still dog slow, none of the beginners courses properly tell you how the guitar actually works, or what a "chord" really is. They're all just "play this and don't worry about it". To be fair it does get you going.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#146

Post by sparky_z »

lukeinator42 wrote: post #113

A good analogy for equal temperament might be the Gregorian calendar, as a year does not evenly divide perfectly into 365 days. So in order to compensate for that we adjust the calendar by a leap year every so often to make the calendar more accurate in the longer term. That's kinda similar to how every note is a little off in equal temperament so that at the larger scale of being able to play all intervals works out…

If only we had just slightly increased the length of each day so that the year divided perfectly into 365 days. Then it would be an even better analogy.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#147

Post by elihu »

amelius wrote: post #9

> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…

Sure, that's basically just intonation (JI). You pick what key you want to play in and a scale, and then you build an instrument around that scale.

(Though something that happens in just intonation is that you often find out you need more notes than you might have originally thought, because JI makes distinctions between notes that are treated as the same in 12-TET. For instance, you might have 10/9 or 9/8 as your major second, or your minor seventh might be 9/5, 16/9, 7/4, or 12/7 depending on context.)

I don't think any just intonation guitar has been mass produced, but you can definitely build one or modify an existing guitar if you have the right tools and are willing to do a bunch of math and learn how to install frets.

This page is about a JI keyboard I built a while back, but there's also a few pictures of a couple old Harmony guitars I adapted to JI: https://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html

Here's a so-so performance of myself playing a Bach piece on a newer and vastly improved version of that just intonation keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbWnDhip0A

In 12-EDO the song has 11 distinct pitch classes. (Bach used the tritone, but not the minor second.) In my straightforward JI interpretation, I use 15 pitch classes. (I would have used 16, but my keyboard simply doesn't have a key for that note.)

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#148

Post by coldtea »

>The best-sounding note combinations (to Western people) are the ones derived from the first few harmonics. In other words, you get the nicest harmony (for Western people) when you multiply and divide your frequencies by ratios of the smallest prime numbers: 2, 3, and 5.

He keeps writing "for western people" but some parts of these are inherent in the human ear evolution and rather universal. All around the world we can find pentatonic music for example, even from ancient peoples, and this includes e.g. West African cultures, China, etc. And traditions that have microtonal inflections will still place the same emphasis on the octave, the fifth, major/minor third, etc the microtones add different flavors but it's not some widely different thing, which is why e.g. middle eastern or Indian songs e.g. can still be played on pianos, simplified (to the nearest approximation) but still retaining a lot, just losing their full flavor.

Re: Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)

#149

Post by porridgeraisin »

coldtea wrote: post #148

> The best-sounding note combinations (to Western people) are the ones derived from the first few harmonics. In other words, you get the nicest harmony (for Western people) when you multiply and divide your frequencies by ratios of the smallest prime numbers: 2, 3, and 5. He keeps writing "for western people" but some parts of these are inherent in the human ear evolution and rather universal. All around the world we…

Nit: Mostly the octave and the fifth in Indian music. Thirds aren't as much of a structural pillar.
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