Comments on: Why Your Guitar Won’t Play Perfectly in Tune—and Why That’s OK

By: Patrick Cardinal

Patrick Cardinal — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 07:09:34 +0000

Really enjoyed your article. It was very interesting, informative, and understandable. I have struggled with this for years, as I tend toward a fingerpicking style using open strings along with fretted.
Higher up the neck, 12th fret and above, it sometimes seems impossible to get the tuning just right. Mostly this happens with the “G” string. Sometimes it makes me cringe in frustration… so close, but just not right! I have been accused of being overly picky and once had to prove to my guitar set-up guy at guitar center… I hesitate to call him a luthier … that the note fretted at the 12th fret was flat compared to the harmonic at that position.
Pretty sure I saw him roll his eyes at me, but can’t be sure. lol
Changing the gauge of the string helped somewhat.
So your article does help to set my mind at ease and just accept the reality of physics
(stupid physics anyway!) and accept the truth. :)
Btw, have you or anyone else here seen or heard of a guitar maker (sorry I cannot remember the brand or where I saw it) that has attempted to alleviate the issue by slightly slanting the frets to compensate for differences in intonation between strings? It looked pretty interesting, though I’m not sure I could get used to it. Maybe a new or younger guitar player would be able to do so?
Thanks again for your article.

By: James Ray Demello

James Ray Demello — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 01:23:02 +0000

And here I just thought it was me.

By: Eric Ouren

Eric Ouren — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 14:08:35 +0000

You have confused the nut for the saddle. The saddle is where compensation occurs, not at the nut. Guitar players can have a lot of fìrmly held just-plain-wrong beliefs about a lot of things when it comes to setting up a guitar. Please don’t exacerbate that by telling them that they must now compensate their nut.

By: Paul Kevin Anderson

Paul Kevin Anderson — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 05:54:42 +0000

A very simple solution is to remove the frets from your guitar. That still leaves the issue of scale length adjustment, difficult to solve on most acoustic guitars with neither nut nor bridge saddle independently adjustable per string.

The other advantage to de-fretted (not merely fretless) playing is that it makes the fret groove tone unplayable, pushing you into microtonal consciousness.

Frets have made the guitar a terribly dull instrument, taught people to de- tune in mid song by string bending, compensated only by amplification that nullifies use of the finger board entirely.

By: Noel Stanley

Noel Stanley — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:29:22 +0000

Very interesting and informative.Thank you very much.

By: Keith Cantrell

Keith Cantrell — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 23:06:42 +0000

This is why I never use an electronic tuner. I use it to get close but then turn it off and use my ear to fine tune. An electronic tuner senses differences that our ears cannot hear and good music should sound good to our ears.

By: Jeff Learman

Jeff Learman — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 22:17:39 +0000

While this explains some apparent tuning issues, it doesn’t address the most vexing one: why doesn’t a perfectly tuned guitar match a perfectly tuned piano? At least two reasons:

1. Pianos are “stretch tuned.” Each octave up is actually a few beats sharp, to compensate for the fact that overtones are a little sharp, so higher notes don’t beat against lower ones.

Different pianos have different stretch (longer ones need less) so there isn’t a universal fix. But there is a good average, which woul be close enough. Thisis moreof a piano problem than a guitar problem, but everyone elsehadtodealwith it.

2. The inharmonicity of all guitar strings is not the same. The perfect places for the frets are different for each string. This is why the are guitars with squiggly frets, called “true intonation.”

If you want your guitar to truly be in tune, get one of these. But don’t expect it to sound the same! We’re used to a little out-of-tune-ness, so these tend to sound a bit sterile.

By: Bob St. Cyr

Bob St. Cyr — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 15:29:13 +0000

Great article. An explanation that is easy to follow and understand for a complex issue. Many times I have tried to explain this idea to players, often unsuccessfully. I think some of them think I’m making stuff up to excuse my inability to make the every note on their guitar sound perfectly in tune all the time!

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:40:04 +0000

Wonderful article! I played trumpet in a professional orchestra where every player was highly skilled. In the brass section we used the science written about here. We knew that the third in a C chord was a different note than the fifth of an A chord or the root of an E chord. Our mantra was to sit on a major third and push on a perfect fifth. The sound of a professional brass section that adheres to “Just” intonation is rich and resonate adding to the emotion of the performance. Thank you for the article!