The Wisdom of Brian Wilson

[fezz parka]

Brian Wilson is right. Digital tuners have ruined music. There used to be a certain magic to recordings where the musicians tuned by ear. Wanna make your recordings sound real? Use the tuner to tune your low E, then tune the rest by ear.
Another thing, this is the best sounding plug-in I've ever used:

[mal paso]

Aww, that's just LSD fueled madness talkin'!





In all honesty, I've been tuning by ear for as long as I can remember

[waparker4]

I use a digital tuner, but I try to use it as fast as possible to get that "inaccuracy magic"

[musicalmartin]

I do this most of the time.Just always done it when all we had were tuning forks and things you blowed through or a probably out of tune piano .I normally tune high E and then by ear but always check on the first D chord .All the guitars I owned in the 60's were frankly non intonable so what you had was what you get.All that without any help from LSD

[Geoff738]

Originally Posted by fezz parka

Brian Wilson is right. Digital tuners have ruined music. There used to be a certain magic to recordings where the musicians tuned by ear. Wanna make your recordings sound real? Use the tuner to tune your low E, then tune the rest by ear.
Another thing, this is the best sounding plug-in I've ever used:

That brings the WOW. And the flutter!

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Easy to overuse though. Don't ask me how I know!

But, my ilok just died so I'm SOL on that for a while.

I do use digital tuners - not really a fan of out of tune guitars, I gotta say.

Cheers,
Geoff

[brookdalebill]

I have some friends who will not use a digital tuner.
One of those friends was on the cover of Guitar Player magazine some years back.
I think the (silent) digital (guitar) tuner is the single greatest
gift to the guitar playing/listening world, yet.
I've never been on the cover of any magazine though, so who cares
what I think?

[neocaster]

Don't think any magic's been lost by anything other than people making music you just don't find magical. Happens to most of us. It's called "getting old."

[mal paso]

Well, that's one way to look at it

[Frontier9]

My guitars, when tuned by me using only my ear, do not possess any magic whatsoever.

[H. Mac]

I also think it's a good idea to tune and to even adjust intonation with ears alone. They're the cheapest tuning device there is, and in the long run, they're more authoritative than any electronic tuner you can buy.

Intonating (and even tuning) by ear is becoming a lost art in this electronic era, with people relying on their eyes and the needle and flashing colored lights on an electronic tuner rather than their ears.

If your electronic tuner tells you your guitar is properly intonated (or tuned), but your ears aren't convinced, what is your next step? Which one do your rely on and which do you "overrule?"

When you play, you listen with your ears, not with an electronic tuner. So when you tune, it should be the same.

[yark14]

Thats interesting.

Since I'm younger, I solely used digital tuners. It took a lot of practice and trial-and-error just to be able to accurately tune by piano.

I'm still not spot-on with my ear, but its come a long way. Comes in handy when the Snark battery dies.

[SamClemons]

I use the digital tuners to get close. Then finish it off by ear. I am usually not satisfied the digital tuners are close enough or maybe I am looking for a different sound. I usually tweak the guitar till the D chord and G chord sound good.

Bass, I typically flatten the E a little bit.

[Martin R]

With Schaller keys, several shims and a Glendale compensated bridge my old '74 Custom still only approximates being in tune...But thanks to this thread I can at least justify it.

[mindlobster]

If being in tune is what separates 'good' from 'not good', there is a problem.

[fezz parka]

Originally Posted by neocaster

Don't think any magic's been lost by anything other than people making music you just don't find magical. Happens to most of us. It's called "getting old."

Speak for yourself. I hear magical stuff "new"every day.

An orchestra tunes by ear. The micro-tonal differences people hear tempers the tuning. And... if you tune a piano with a digital tuner so that every octave matches, it'll sound like crap.

[woodman]

I totally admire anybody who can get through a gig staying in tune without touching a tuner. It means you have (a) a good ear and (b) good ears you've taken care of over the years. That will never happen with me, though — didn't start playing seriously until post-Vietnam, when mine were pretty well cooked by various ordnance. I could tell when it was out of tune but had a hard time homing in on the fine zone where it's *in* tune.

But of course that was the '60s, when a band actually being in tune was a rare and wondrous thing. It was ballpark tuning, and that's what everybody was used to. Dylan's early electric stuff (with him on Strat), especially "Highway 61 Revisited," was grossly out of tune at times, but who cared, because it had soul or whatever you want to call it. Sounds awful to modern ears, but that back then, folks would accept warts and all.

In 1973, I was playing psychedelic garage rock with whoever I could get to prop up an instrument, and even to me it sounded atrocious. So I spent the then-princely sum of $240 for a Conn Strobotuner. At ensuing gigs, people started coming up and telling us how much better we were — had we been practicing more, or what? (Actually, we practiced far more than we gigged, hell, it was a garage band!) We soon got the reputation as one of the better bands in town, even though two of the guys were total clunks.

On the other hand, I agree with Fezz and Brian Wilson to the extent that digital precision has taken a lot of the raw energy out of music. Brian kept his band in tune by the standards of the day far better than some, but when you hear Beach Boys records today, you think, dang, that B string's out, or whatever. ... When I first started listening to blues records, the precarious tuning and the way the player would compensate for it were part of the charm. But to a lot of younger folks who've never heard music that wasn't auto-tuned, it sounds weird and somehow scary.

Digital precision goes so far beyond the music being played and sung that post-production sometimes carries more weight than the "talent" involved. Case in point: Since the Stragglers broke up, the drummer, my bassman buddy and I have been hiring out occasionally as a rhythm section (the Groove Swampers) to support various singer/songwriters who need a band on the quick. We're doing a record with a buddy on Wednesday ... having done extensive pre-production and getting a groove on in rehearsal, I asked the studio guy if we could record without a click. NOPE — no grid, no session. Sheesh! But I understand, since all my audio editing experience is in the digital realm, and I would quaver at mixing off of the timeline instead of the bar line.

So nowadays, it can be hard to follow the heart and soul when the mind component — i.e. digital precision — is so strong a force. Far gone is the day of crowding the band around an omnidirectional mike and throwing down ... but if you could make that sound good, that meant you were a pretty damn good band!

Sorry for the book-length post, but this thead just popped the cap on a bunch of stuff I've had on my mind lately.

[fezz parka]

Listen to some old swing stuff, especially trombones. They're always a little sharp. That's where Sinatra learned to sing, and Francis Albert was always a little sharp at the end of his phrases.

[woodman]

Originally Posted by fezz parka

Listen to some old swing stuff, especially trombones. They're always a little sharp. That's where Sinatra learned to sing, and Francis Albert was always a little sharp at the end of his phrases.

Yeah, he did tend to drift ... didn't bother the bobby-soxers, though!

[Ecadad]

I usually just tune to whatever my E string is at the time. I used a digital tuner for the first time in two monthes and my guitar was tuned to D#!

[woodman]

Originally Posted by fezz parka

An orchestra tunes by ear. The micro-tonal differences people hear tempers the tuning. And... if you tune a piano with a digital tuner so that every octave matches, it'll sound like crap.

Very true — a skilled piano tuner gets the strings just the right micro-amount out of tune to compensate for the tempered scales.

But I've noticed that even in modern rock 'n' roll bands where everybody tunes before the set, a micro-tonal divergence starts to happen by about the third or fourth song as the instruments and strings warm up, people bend notes, whang some rhythm, and so forth. The most aggravating thing about digital tuners to me is when players obsess on them between songs instead of letting the good times roll!