View Single Post
Old 11-13-2010, 08:29 PM   #32
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,019
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by karbomusic View Post
Shep is exactly correct and so are you because you are both saying the exact same thing. Not tuning the guitar to equal temperment will cause the problem shep described. "Tuning to an E chord" is the opposite of using equal temperment.

Karbo
Well, more precisely, "tuning to an E chord" is wrong. As in, the guitar will be out-of-tune, by any normal measure.

this is not some fault of the guitar, or of guitars in general (I cannot believe we're even talking about this). It's how "tuning" works. One may as well say that a guitar can never be perfectly in tune because if you tune it to the hum of the electrical transformer outside my house then nothing else will be in tune.

At first I thought Sheppola was being irrelevantly picayune and bringing up different temperaments just for the sake of saying something. Now I'm not sure whether he, or anyone else, might be genuinely confused by the fact that "tuning" a guitar to a particular chord is actually wrong.

IOW, at first I thought talking about temperament was just a pointless distraction, but now I cannot tell whether some people genuinely don't understand that "tuning to an E chord" is actually outright wrong, and will necessarily produce an out-of-tune guitar. I can't tell whether we're trying to be polite or respectful or something, or whether there is some genuine confusion.

I mean, maybe there is some old hippy in Ohio teaching guitar students to fret an E chord and then tune all the strings until they are perfectly consonant or something... I'm not trying to be a dick or to pick a fight, I just thought everyone knew that each string had to be tuned to the correct equal-tempered note, if you want to play music that will be in tune with all the other instruments in the wide world.

Maybe this notion of "tuning to chords" is more common than I realized, but I honestly can't believe we're even seriously talking about it.
yep is offline   Reply With Quote