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Chapter 3: Grab Hold, Tune Up, Play On!
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acoustic, you can use the tuner’s built-in mic. When you play a note, it registers
as a pitch on the tuner’s display. This display allows you to use your
eyes in addition to, or instead of, your ears to check whether you’re in tune. If
you want to hear your guitar, you need to plug a cord from the tuner’s output
into your amp. But you don’t need to hear the guitar to tune it with an electronic
tuner.
Many people tune silently out of courtesy to fellow musicians and other listeners,
and, of course, because the sound of guitars tuning up can annoy
some people. But tuning silently is required in some situations — like televised
concerts, where the musicians must wait in absolute silence until the
cue to come in with bold, in-tune music. By keeping your tuner on and having
it between your guitar and amp (or, if you’re using effects, between your guitar
and first effect), you can tune by turning down the volume on your amp.
A tuner senses which pitch you’re playing and tells you, by way of its meter
or LEDs (light-emitting diodes), the closest pitch (A, B%, B, C, and so on) and
whether you’re flat or sharp of it. It’s a great system because you can also use
a tuner to get into alternate tunings, such as open G, for the times you have
to retune the guitar to play slide — doing it quickly and silently.
A tuner can occupy a permanent berth in your signal chain, or you can plug it
in at will, just putting it in your guitar case or on top of your amp when you’re
done. Either way, an electronic tuner is the most fundamental electronic
device you need to own — more important than any other outboard effect.
You can play a guitar in tune without effects and still make music, but you
can’t play out of tune and make (tolerable) music, no matter how many
effects you own.
Even though you can get the guitar in tune with itself (using the relative
method) and can, therefore, play by yourself with no problems, it’s a good idea
to check often that you haven’t strayed too far from concert pitch. Playing flat
or sharp of concert pitch isn’t bad for the instrument, but you can condition
your ears to hear flat or sharp if you stay out of tune for too long.
If your harmonica player’s out of tune, guess
what? You’re out of tune. Or more precisely,
you’re the one who has to adjust to him because
you can change your tuning and he can’t. The
same is true with any fixed-pitch instrument.
Some older organs have tuning problems, too,
and tend to play below standard-pitch, which
means you may have to adjust to them. I once
Who let the cats out?
played in a club with a house organ that played
flat, but the house harmonica player’s instruments
were sharp. Worse, the harmonica player
was the club’s owner and you couldn’t refuse
his sitting in! The organ was flat, the harmonica
was sharp, and the musicians were stuck in the
middle. Talk about having the blues!
TEAM LinG