Is your intonation causing this?

I think we can all agree that there’s nothing worse than an out-of-tune guitar. When the dogs in your neighborhood start singing along to your jam, it’s time to rethink things a bit.

Not tuning your guitar is certainly one cause, but that can be easily rectified by, well, tuning the darn thing. Having your guitar set up by a professional at least once a year should be mandatory (though I’ve heard that twice a year is actually more proper).

Despite those two things, however, due to the tempered tuning nature of the guitar sometimes stuff still doesn’t come out 100% in tune. The variances are usually small, and by now our ears are for the most part used to it, but that should not preclude us from trying harder.

But what can we do? I mean, if the darn thing has been set up, frets dressed, truss rod adjusted, you’ve used three different tuners on it, and some notes STILL don’t play completely in tune, what the heck are we supposed to do about it?

Fret not, my fretting Fretheads…

Now I’m sure that, after having read that setup, you were probably thinking I had some really cool “trick” or equipment solution to the problem. If you were one of those people, shame on you for thinking I would give you a magic pill to swallow; you should know me better than that. No, my solution is actually going to take some work. Sorry, but you asked for it!

My friend Erik of Modified by Man was the first person that hipped me to this, and I am a bit ashamed that I hadn’t really thought of it myself. He plays a road-tested Telecaster. Every time he plays a standard open C chord, the B string is always slightly flat. To compensate, Erik has to use his first finger to bend the note sharp a little bit to keep everything in tune. Needless to say this is not the easiest thing to do, but because the quality of his music is so important to him, he took the time to work out and practice bending the B string slightly sharp in order to get things in tune.

I was also watching a Jeff Beck concert that has been playing on US cable TV a lot recently. On one part of one song the bassist – the incredible Tal Wilkenfeld – had to bend her A string on the 7th fret in order to get the note ‘E’ to tune up to the rest of the band properly. This was something I saw more so than something I heard (which is a testament to how good she is) but it further reinforced not only how important being in tune is, but also how the professionals truly set themselves apart from the amateurs.

If you are interested in exploring this further, my suggestion is to first and foremost get your guitar set up. Doing so will give you the cleanest slate to work from. Once you have that done, use a clip-on tuner and start playing some single notes. See where the tuner recognizes the note you are playing and bend the string accordingly. Of course, this really only applies to notes that – when fretted – sound flat. Notes that are sharp obviously can’t be bent flat, and that generally means your guitar isn’t tuned properly to begin with.

Try this on several strings and in different parts of the fingerboard. See which notes are the most out-of-tune and practice getting them in tune as best as possible. In time, and with diligent practice, it will become second nature and your music will sound even sweeter than it already does now!