Over the past month before i start to play i have been learning to tune by ear. Iuse relative tuning and once i get the high E in tune then i get all the other strings pretty much spot on. After i finished i check my work with my tuner. My questions are can most people get tune each string so is exactly tune or is it always alittle off ? And also should i learn to get the high E in tune with a reference such as pitch pipes or should i just no what it sounds like ?
Thanx
I can't do it with a guitar (yet). When I was playing violin regularly, I could tone it by ear without assistance of a tuner or reference note. I think the notes get burned into your brain after a while. You will be able to tell when the note is even slightly out of tune.
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I can't tune by ear, although I can hear when its out (odd but true).
There's an interesting article here about tuning, well worth a read:
Nowadays I use an electronic tuner exclusively. When I first bought my guitar I didn't have one and my guitar never sounded good. I think the time for tuning by ear will come later but I want to concentrate on learning how to play right now. I can tell if one of the strings is way off though. So can everybody else I imagine.
oktay
I also tune to relative pitch. but I always have to go back to my tuner and check. I usually creep; meaning that I tend to tune higher and higher. without a tuner my pitch must compound itself.
I used to have a good ear, still do in some ways, but I dont trust them for tuning when I need to record, or play with others.
now that I play so much slide guitar if I hear myself flat I can slide up higher. I can compensate pretty fast now.
When I first started playing the biggest challenge was getting and staying in tune since there was no such thing as an electronic tuner. I got what I thought was pretty good. Then Henry Ford invented the car and shortly after that the electronic tuner came to be :lol: . Using the tuner I found that I always tuned by ear a little sharp on the bass strings and a little flat on the treble strings. Guess my ear isn't really that good.
Anyway, I can also tune a lot quicker with the tuner so I now tune mostly with it and just "relative" tune individual strings by ear if just one or two sound a little off.
I've gotten to where I'll tweak a string by ear to keep playing if it gets to sounding off, but I've always used a tuner for my main tuning. (After putting the strings pretty closely in tune by tuning to the relative tuning, touching it up with the tuner.) Since I've started playing, I've often had experienced players borrow my guitar and start tweaking tuning knobs. On getting the guitar back, it's never been tuned quite right by the tuner. Ear-tuning gets done by Pythagorean tuning, which isn't right in our equal-tempered system. The tuner's set up for that deliberate small inaccuracy built into all of the intervals except octaves so that every semitone is the same. Your ears aren't. Same with relative tuning by harmonics. It won't tune you properly to play equally tempered.
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