[musictlk] tuner

Tue May 24 02:41:13 UTC 2016

Dale,

Apologies in advance for a rather long answer to your question--

There is an iOS app called Talking Tuner which will say the note and how many “cents” sharp or flat the note is. There are 100 cents per semitone, or half-step. Each fret on the guitar is a half-step. If you’re more than 1/4 step or 50 cents off, it will assume a different note is what you’re after and reference that note instead. (So if you’re more than a quarter step above the low E and closest to the F above that, it would then say you were a particular number of cents below (or above) F, for example. The app only costs 99 cents and seems to work fairly well. It is the only talking solution I am aware of. As tuning is a dynamic business, tuning to verbal cues is somewhat cumbersome.

At some point, you’ll probably want to try to learn to work without a separate tuner, and if you can get fairly close by ear, you can tune with an audible tuner, and learn to listen for the beat sounds. Have you ever tried this?

To tune with beats, as you approach the correct pitch from a tuner or reference instrument, you’ll start to hear a fluttering sound. The flutter will slow down as you approach matching the pitch. If you go too far, you’ll hear the fluttering speed back up. When the beats vanish, you’ve matched the pitch.

If you’re not familiar with this sound, you might use the app I mentioned, or ask someone to assist you in getting tuned dead-on, then while listening to a tuner, slightly de-tune a string and the flutter will appear. (Remember the flutter is between two very close pitches so you must play the same note on the guitar and the tuning reference.) You can actually determine exactly how far from in-tune you are in cycles per second by simply counting the beats, or flutters per second. This is also expressed in Hertz (Hz).

This will work with a tuner or most any clear, clean tone (the closer to a pure sine wave, the better). The more complex the sound reference gets, the harder it will become to hear the beats. 

There are many different guitar tunings, but for a standard E, A, D, G, B, E tuning, you can also use this same technique to tune a guitar to itself, if you can guess pretty closely (or precisely match the low E string to a reference) you can then tune each successively higher string to the 5th fret of the string below it EXCEPT that you play the 4th fret on the G string (4th from the above the lowest) for a B (5th string from the lowest).

Just in case you’re tuning a 12-string, you tune pretty much the same way, but mute even the second string in the “course” meaning the same-pitch string that is paired closely to the one you’re tuning, then reverse the process and tune the second string, however you don’t need to tune the second string in the course by offsetting those 5 frets (or 4 for the B string) because both strings in the course are the same note (though some are an octave apart). That means you can just play the two strings as an open pair and listen for beats. and it works for pairs of the exact same notes as well as pairs an octave apart (12 string guitars use both pairings). Just remember to tune the second string in the course to the first, or you may not match the strings below that you started tuning to with the first in the pair.

None of this will solve the problem of tuning to another instrument though— if you tune the guitar to itself, it will generally sound fine when played alone, and if you tune to a tuner, the guitar will sound fine alone too, but if you’re going to play with other instruments, unless you’re certain those are tuned to standard (A=440 Hz) tuning, you may still have a problem. Common culprits are old pianos and organs which may have gone out of tune more or less all together, and are often a bit flat overall. 

Other common issues are needing to tune to recordings to play along, Especially older, pre-synthesizer music, as well as most any old analog recordings (anything from the mid-to-early 80’s and before) may not be tuned to a standard reference. Some players, like Eddie Van Halen as a notable example, and many other “metal” players intentionally tune about a quarter step flat to slacken the strings and make playing complex pieces possible. In that case, the whole band had to tune to the re-tuned lead guitar.

In such a case, you need to learn to listen and compare the guitar tuning by ear to the other instrument(s) or set a tuner to the alternative reference such as A = 438 Hz, or A = 442 Hz, etc. You can make such an adjustment to the app I mentioned above but the setting are made through the iOS settings area, and not the app itself. You can also adjust the sensitivity from 5 cents, to 2 cents, or 1 cent, and there is some other “strobe” setting that I have not explored. So in that case, an accessible tuner isn’t much help unless you know what to set the tuner to for a reference frequency.

Also, be aware that any non-digital recordings like records and tapes will go off pitch at the mercy of what you play back on— of those are off-speed, they are also off pitch.

As far as the meaning of A = 440 Hz., this is the standard tuning that most orchestras tune to, and the standard reference that most piano tuners will tune a piano to, unless requested otherwise. Modern synthesizers generally default to this reference, but more advanced units can have their reference altered at will. In such a tuning, all notes are mathematically related to the 440 Hz meaning that many come up to confusing fractional numbers, but all the A’s will line up as some number of doublings or halvings of 440. An octave down is 220 Hz, and 2 octaves down is 110. The A on a traditional tuning of a guitar is 110 Hz. The reason I’m explaining all of this is because with voiceover on, using the app I mentioned, your iDevice may report a particular note and the frequency, such as “D# +43 Cents, 159.5 Hz” and if you ask for sighted assistance, your assistant will be able to tell you the frequency on the iOS display every time the tuner listens to a note. 

If you switch to A = 442 Hz, then an octave above is 884 Hz, and below an octave is 221 Hz, then two octaves down is 110.5 Hz, and so on. Hertz, by the way, is the name of the fellow who first proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, though the term applies to all cyclical waveforms, including sounds from an instrument or voice.

It may all sound really confusing, but there are just 6 notes you’re tuning to, and the pitches and interval spacings remain consistent, unless you move to alternative tunings. Once you learn a method that works for you, you may end up doing things the same way for a great many years, and it will quickly become second nature.

Again, sorry for the lengthy post, but I hope it helps.

	-Richard

On May 23, 2016, at 7:51 PM, Foggddm--- via musictlk <musictlk at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Can anyone recommend a guitar tuner for electric guitars which works well 
> in a live (noisy) environment? Either one that makes a noise when the string 
> is in tune or vibrates etc as a flashing LED won't work for me.
> Dale Hayes
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