When I was a wee lad of twelve and started playing guitar (circa 1980), we were still a few years away from small, portable, and affordable electronic tuners. Pitch pipes and tuning forks were in vogue back then, as well as the time tested technique of shouting to the keyboard player, "Hey man, give me an A!"
Those days seem to be gone forever, given way to little plastic black (or silver) battery powered, plug in, tune-up, and get down to business devices. Now don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy tuning my guitar without having to scream at the drummer to shut the hell up (musician jargon for "please stop playing"). However, after many years of musicians utilizing these neat little boxes, I've come to realize that many of today’s players really suck at tuning their guitars with their ears! In fact, their ears just suck, period. I have seen guitarists who could tear apart the fretboard, but could not tune their instrument. I also notice many of these players can’t bend a note to pitch, being consistently sharp or flat when pushing the string. How has it come to this?
"The man that hath no music in himself..." --Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (V, i, 83-85)
As great as technology can be (just look at the Xbox!), it can also make us weak if we rely on it too much. So I reach out to all my fellow guitar players and ask that you all unplug your tuners, and use the tuner God gave you… your ears! Remember, we are musicians first, and the guitar is our instrument of choice for getting our music out of us. So in the end it is our ears that make us fine musicians, not our fingers.
For those of us who need to improve our inner-ear-tuning, what is the best method? Well of course we can use the matching harmonics method between the fifth and seventh frets, or the straight pitch matching technique of fretting the fifth fret (those not familiar with these do a Google search on “tuning a guitar”) But alas, I find the best way to go is to just become familiar with what the open strings of your guitar sound like. After getting the A or E string from another source (tuning fork anyone?), knowing how each open string on the guitar sounds relative to each other is the quickest and easiest way to tune (and other musicians will be impressed with you!). It has a little kind of strange melody to it which is fairly easy to learn. Another method is to tune to an open chord like C maj. or E maj.
Some may complain that using your own ear won’t be as accurate as a tuner, and they are correct… to a point. I was never one to believe that you have to be anal about tuning in order for things to sound “in tune.” I once did a session where the producer was so crazy about tuning, he had me tune after every take! If I was doing a guitar track where most of the chords where in the fifth position, he had me play a fifth position chord and tune to that!
Of course I’m not advocating that everybody throw away their tuners. They come in handy in the studio and on stage. But I am advocating that you have your ear together enough NOT to need one. Tuning your own instrument is an essential part of being a musician and guitarist. If you can’t, it’s easy enough to fix and should not be put off.
"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie…” –Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (I, i, 231-232)
