Perhaps there is a secret; I’ve often wondered why I see other musicians “retuning” their instruments – and here I am talking mainly about guitar – when there was nothing in particular that would have changed the tuning. I think we sometimes hear the harmonics in motion, but I have no proof of it, although, that is kind of one of the points of ‘sound in motion’ & “controlling it”. We want to hear so specifically when we are playing the stringed instruments that we start hearing the reverberations more than the whole tones, and our tuning sense starts to grow “sharp”. The natural tendency when this happens is to tune the instrument “up” a little, like disciplining, like tightening a belt to hold the pants closer to the hip.
In some senses, there is little importance to “being in tune” with the whole tone frequencies, the pure sound of the Western Scale [equal temperament] that we know and base so much of our music upon. The guitar is tuned “relatively”; as long as the strings are in the right relationship, the sound can be made decent. If it is a band, and they tune relative to each other and in the same relationship, there can be an additive element to being “out of tune” together. Still, there is the natural artist guitarist/musician living within; it is hard to believe that the sound is right when it is not “classically tuned”.
There was a time in my life when I used to wonder which way the frequencies were going to go; I had to think, if that sound is “below” this sound, I need to tighten/loosen the string to find the right relationship. I used to be amazed when I was often wrong even though I thought I understood tuning the instrument. What I found out over time was that my ear developed toward a few cents sharp, and when I was tuning, I often wanted to tune to the next harmonic sharper, even when loosening the grip was really what was needed.
I think tuning sharp is a somewhat natural thing for tightly wound musical artists, but I don’t know for certain because I have had so few opportunities in my long pursuit of professional level music to actually sit and discuss experiences and theory with other players, particularly opportunity where there isn’t a fight going on over what is right or wrong, just a discussion of what “your experience” is. I’ve heard countless players in my days in Los Angeles, Denver, & Nashville with whom I’d love to talk about their playing, because I think I almost hear something, but I know from hearing them talk, from hearing them present their playing [& writing] that there is a strong likelihood that as soon as we started to talk about my experience questions, the barriers would go up as they try to protect the ways they justify to themselves the ways they have adapted to cover their pursuits as they are, not as they could be in music. There is a wall, a decision barrier which protects them from having to break down their thinking so that they can open up their feeling and become more conscious of their “sharp” playing. Tuning sharp is like jamming out in tune.
I began to think about all this pretty seriously this past month [after I was recovering from some surgery, and perhaps a small dose of fever/cold which was influencing my hearing?] when I finally “broke” the neck of a favorite guitar. I was doing a little cause and effect investigation – I was playing in a different tuning environment than normal [a different room with different acoustic properties] – and I was still using a tuning fork as my guide, but I noticed after the neck broke, first, the guitar, which I had been using for well over a decade, had always been at risk for a neck break because the grain of the wood at the tension point was wrong for high tension tuning; second, I noticed that when I have “a cold/flu season ear”, I tend to ramp up even sharper …. I know this is something that I’ll have to protect against in the future to diminish tension on instruments [and budget]. I had known from the start that I was stressing the strength construction of this guitar, but it had been years since the wood in the guitar had fought back by saying “I’m not that strong”. I hadn’t even broken any strings in so long that I couldn’t recall the last time I had done that, although when I first had the instrument, that was an issue as I “wound tight”. Part of the reason there had been no broken strings was because I’d learned the limits of the instrument and the amount of tension that the instrument could take. In this case, the strings didn’t break, the grain of the wood gave way and the neck broke at the headstock. It could be repaired, but there are issues, obviously.
Still, I am left wondering, do the frequencies play with us -- “the spirit world” – or do we play with them? It is a wondrous thing tuning sharp …
