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Some instruments, such as the violin, don't limit the musician to particular pitches, allowing to choose the tuning system "on the fly". Many performers on such instruments adjust the notes to be more in tune than the equal temperament system allows, perhaps even without realizing it.
Like the violin and other fretless stringed instruments, the pedal steel guitar places absolute control of pitch into the hands of the player. Most steel guitarists tune their instrument to just intonation. The steel guitar is unique among western instruments in its ability to create complex chords in just intonation in any key. Smooth, beatless chords are part of the steel guitar's characteristic sound.

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Now remember, tuners are giving you a “tempered” reading, based on the “equal temperament scale“. That means each pitch is equidistant from the next. But if a singer sings a major scale starting on “A”, for example, the third note in the scale, C#, would probably be sung a bit low to a tuner. That’s because in any particular “key” the third is usually “felt” low.
There’s a good reason for this. It’s called “just intonation“, meaning each pitch is tuned to “blend” best in it’s function in that particular key. Are you still with me? So the singer sings the C# quite low because it is more mellow in that key. If someone sings or plays an A and another plays a C#, those notes will clash until the C# is lowered, 26 cents low to be exact. A cent is 1/100th of a half tone.
That’s just one example of “just intonation”. Each note of the scale is slightly different in its needs in order to sound “right” in that scale. Now throw in different keys, especially minor keys, and things get really complicated.

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Experienced singers and string players use “just” intonation – they adapt to any keys and modulations (key changes) because they have infinitely variable control over pitch. Within certain limits, the pitch of wind instruments can also be varied by adjusting embouchure (lip position/tension). A group of musicians instinctively approaches a common overtone structure, minimizing the “friction” between all the voices in a chord. This results in the wonderfully rich but compact sound of symphony orchestras or gospel choirs.

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A few more mice that you can check out on your own: http://jblinearmusic.blogspot.com/2006/08/playing-woodwinds-in-tune-just.html http://www.casa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=681&Itemid=160 http://www.soundpostonline.com/archive/summer2002/page6.htm

A fretless guitar that can play JI:
http://www.guitarplayer.com/story.asp?storycode=12723

Some JI radicals:
http://kylegann.com/tuning.html

1/1/[One over one] : the Quarterly Journal of the Just Intonation Network (781.605On) http://www.library.uiuc.edu/mux/printjournals.htm

There's tons of this stuff if you search around a little. There are more mice in my pocket than there are beats in your 3rds, Eric.

[This message was edited by David Doggett on 02 October 2006 at 10:11 PM.]

relaying of links on presumably (shift)

what everybody does and hears (shift)

And prefers. (shift)

Should I ever become devoid of what I hear (shift)

and prefer, I'll adopt one at random. (shift)

Posting long links without coding then as a "url link"(shift)

makes for tedious scrolling. (shift)

I think my mouse works hard enough..

EJL

In terms of symphony orchestras, they don’t exclusively play either JI or ET, but a mixture of the two. The orchestra attempts to ground itself to the ET scale in terms of the root of the key. For that reason they often tune up to the oboe, which, even though it is a horn, can deviate very little from ET, due to the double reed. But the overwhelming majority of the instruments in an orchestra or a wind band can and do intonate JI extensively. A lot of either intonation just happens automatically or unconsciously, to match the loudest lead instrument or possibly the bass line. That explains how orchestras play successfully behind the lead of oboes and pianos. But there are some quite complicated discussions about when to use which system of intonation, from chord to chord, and how composers and conductors can convey their wishes to the players. In fact there is a whole movement of composers who object to ET encroachment in orchestral intonation and who write pure JI orchestral pieces. There are also discussions among string players about when not to use the open strings, in order to avoid JI/ET conflicts. It really is all a bit complicated, and unfortunately it takes more words to engage in a serious discussion of these things than it does to throw out sound bites of sarcasm and ridicule.

I don’t understand your problem with the links in my last post. The marked quotes are followed by the links to the sites they came from. I just copied the URL address. It only takes one mouse click for each one, whether I copy in the whole address or replace it with a link name. The remainder of the links are to sites way to long to quote on the Forum, but which may be of interest to some people, and which further refute your groundless criticisms of my comments. If you have specific suggestions about a better way to post these links, I’m open.

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The "Wreckmiester III" looks interesting..

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Like the violin and other fretless stringed instruments, the pedal steel guitar places absolute control of pitch into the hands of the player. Most steel guitarists tune their instrument to just intonation. The steel guitar is unique among western instruments in its ability to create complex chords in just intonation in any key. Smooth, beatless chords are part of the steel guitar's characteristic sound.

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Bobby Lee (a.k.a. b0b) - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
Williams D-12 E9, C6add9, Sierra Olympic S-12 (F Diatonic)
Sierra Laptop S-8 (E6add9), Fender Stringmaster D-8 (E13, C6 or A6) My Blog

DD:

For as much as you seem to be able to write, it's not that you can't read...

It's more that you Don't.

EJL

[This message was edited by Eric West on 03 October 2006 at 09:18 PM.]

Jeff Agnew brought this subject up early in this thread:

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Several years ago he told me that he had Lloyd Green sit down and tune his guitar by ear until he was satisfied. Then Jeff hooked up a tuner and wrote down the numbers for all the open strings and pulls. That became the basis for his first chart (pre-Peterson).

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Bob misunderstood and thought someone said Lloyd tuned by a chart. I corrected him by paraphrasing Jeff A’s post:

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In Jeff Agnew's post above, he said that Jeff Newman once told him that he (Newman) had Lloyd Green tune a guitar by ear. Then he checked everything with a meter, and that is where Newman's chart first came from. I don't think anyone meant to imply that Lloyd himself ever used such a chart.

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Notice that no one said Lloyd used a meter, only that he tuned “by ear.” When I said in the above quote “Then he checked everything with a meter,” I meant Jeff N. checked Lloyd’s ear tuning with a meter, because that is what Jeff A. said. Apparently you thought I meant Lloyd checked everything with a meter. I guess my use of “he” was ambiguous, because then you said:

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Well Mr Doggett, when I've talked to him, as I have regularly for a couple years, he's never said anything about tuning any special metered way.

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This confused me and Jim Cohen, because I never said Lloyd tuned with a meter. I’m sorry my “he” was ambiguous, but I assumed everyone had read Jeff A’s post, where he clearly said that Jeff N. used the meter, not Lloyd. There’s certainly no ill will over this confusion between you and me, and I’m sorry Lloyd felt he had to defend you. Hopefully this clears that up and we all agree it was Jeff, not Lloyd, who used the meter, and no one ever said that Lloyd had used a meter.

But then you said:

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No "cents sharp or flat by some 200$ Virtual Strobe Tuner". I saw, and indeed touched the old round chromatic tuner he uses.

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This introduces a whole other aspect to the confusion. Jeff A. and I only said Lloyd tuned “by ear.” We assumed he took a reference pitch from somewhere, probably his Es, and tuned all the other strings and all the pedal and lever stops by ear. Indeed, Lloyd’s email confirmed exactly that. Jeff’s chart (as posted above by Earnest Bovine) clearly shows that tuning by ear Lloyd did indeed end up with strings and stops from +10 cents sharp to -18 cents flat from straight up ET by a meter. The thirds for the E chord are 14 cents below the tonic Es; the thirds for the A chord are 10 cents below the As; and the thirds for the C# chord (A pedal plus F lever) are 12 cents below the C#s. These are very close to pure JI thirds, and far from ET thirds, which, like all ET intervals should be straight up 0 cents difference by a meter. You also mention Lloyd’s chromatic pitch pipes. That, along with your contention that he tunes “No cents sharp or flat” raises the possibility that instead of tuning totally by ear, he tuned all the strings and stops to the chromatic tuner. That would be straight up ET for everything, and indeed “No cents sharp or flat.” But here is what Lloyd himself said:

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After first giving me a 440 for reference Jeff then asked me to tune my steel until I was satisfied it was as close to what I considered "in tune" as I could get (actually I tune my top E to between 441 & 442, just slightly sharp to the 440. The rest is done strictly by ear and "feel").

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So now we need Lloyd to clarify what he means “by ear.” I thought he meant only the E came from a tuner or pitch pipe, and all the rest of the notes were completely by ear, with no further reference pitches for any of the other notes. But maybe you thought he meant he tuned all the strings and stops by ear to the chromatic notes of his chromatic pitch pipe, resulting in a straight up ET tuning, and not the essentially JI chart Jeff made out by comparing Lloyd’s tuning to a meter. If that is what you think (and I may be completely wrong about what you think on this), then I believe you are wrong. But only Lloyd can clarify that.

I think I understand that your interest, other than defending your own preferences, is to give novices the simplest possible tuning method. But sooner or later many players will discover that if they tune by ear, it may not jive with the tuner. Then there are also many self-taught old school steelers who learned to tune by ear before there were chromatic tuners available. When they finally buy a chromatic meter, some of them will notice that the way they have been tuning their whole life doesn’t jive with the meter. But some very complicated charts and fancy meter presets sound better to them than simply using the meter straight up for every pitch. This is confusing at first. But there is an explanation for that, and it has been known by other musicians for hundreds (thousands?) of years. My only intention is that they be aware of why what their ears may guide them to and what their store-bought meter says are truly different. It’s not their imagination, it’s not a bad setup on their instrument, and it’s not because they have bad ears. It’s simply because of the two different systems of tuning, the natural system of JI that their ears hear (okay, not yours), and the artificial tuning system for tuning keyboards that is programmed into all the meters. Once they understand the difference between the two systems, they are free to choose one or the other or something in between. The top pros don’t agree, and use both methods. I think even novices need to know about this, even if they decide to tune straight up by a meter for simplicity.

But every single time tuning by ear, or tuning to a JI chart comes up, you jump in with claims that anything but ET is too complicated, and only ET will work, because you’ve used it for xx years, and Buddy uses it, and keyboards use it, lots of guitar players use it, all the meters use it, and so it can’t work to use anything but ET. Well, then I feel compelled to counter those false notions. Most top pros don’t use straight up ET; strings, horns, vocalists, and even some studio guitar players don’t use ET exclusively; and in millions of performances and recordings, ET and JI intonation have been mixed successfully. Then you come back with more remarks, and it takes off from there. I’m not trying to tell people how they should tune. I’m just trying to make them aware of all the options, and help them understand (from knowledge far beyond the steel guitar world) why there are such options. How do we keep this friendly and useful for other Forum participants? No hard feelings here. I like your gonzo style and wit, and you’re probably a great steeler who plays damn well in tune. Your challenges have spurred me to learn more about this stuff than I otherwise would have. But maybe for everyone else’s sake, enough is enough. How do we stop this?

(It’s irrelevant how long either of us have played steel or tuned a particular way; and I won’t waste people’s time addressing that. The explanations of JI and ET can be derived by physicists who don’t play music at all, and also from the whole world of music over the centuries.)

(And my posts fit my screen with no problem. I had no idea they were causing problems for others. The cartoon on page 2 ran out of my screen, but not my own posts on the next page. I took out some spaces. If that doesn’t fix it let me know and I will replace the full URL addresses with short link names.)

I'll try and stop caring about how you represent my thoughts, and be more unconcerned how you redirect my comments to important people in my business. I think that's the only thing I consider discourteous.

If you're serious, you might tell "us" more about "your" experience playing with telecasters pianos and fiddles.

That's what I've tried to do. Thirty years worth of it for better or worse.

You run the risk of a new "David Doggett" coming out of the alley and haranguing you to death.

Probably like in the Old West, some dirty faced kid with a rusty keyboard.

And no face..

EJL

[This message was edited by Eric West on 03 October 2006 at 05:59 PM.]

I have played guitar for about 45 years, but not commercially. I never learned to flat pick, but play folk, blues (a lot of slide), and bluegrass with finger picks, and also play a little Flamenco. In the '70s I learned Dobro and pedal steel in Nashville, and played in a place across the River (Mother's?) with the people who started the original Station Inn. When the bar closed we would go to someone's house and play bluegrass and western swing until the sun came up. In those days people like Vassar Clements and Josh Graves dropped by to jam with us. I played pedal steel in The Broadway Club, which was a second floor bar just off Broadway. Compared to the A list, I was the ZZZ list. But I did play with a variety of guitars and fiddles. I got tired of my day job (high rise construction laborer) and went back to school. Over in Knoxville, while at UT, I played steel, Dobro and sax in a country-rock band. I recorded steel on a commercial or two, and backed up people on vanity records that never went anywhere (they shoulda got the C list guys). When I got into grad school at USC in Lost Angeles, I was too busy for music and gave it up (except for myself at home) for over 20 years (but I kept going to the clubs to hear all kinds of music, as well as the symphony and the opera – love the sound of an orchestra full of strings and horns going full tilt JI).

A few years ago, after getting divorced and no longer having a wife and four kids around me full time, I pulled my old Maverick out from under the bed, bought an old tenor sax, and started playing with groups again. I discovered the Forum and soon graduated to an S12 extended E9, then to an S12U. I also have a D10, but never play it. For these few years I have been playing around the area with rockabilly, alt country, singer-songwriter and blues/jazz groups. I have played alongside keyboards and fiddles, but mostly guitars.

My main group right now is The Philadelphia Blues Messengers, and we play Chicago blues to avant garde jazz. The instruments are (not all at the same time) telecaster, mouth harp, electric bass, drums, soprano to bari saxes, flutes, trumpet, didjeridoo, conch shells, and me on pedal steel and sax. We played this past summer at the annual West Oak Lane Jazz Festival on the bill with War and the Sun Ra Archestra (okay, not on the same stage). Here’s our web site under construction (http://thebluesmessengers.com/content/view/1/9/). There are a couple of live show clips, inexplicably at different speeds, but they don’t feature me. You can hear me playing the signature bass line of Hipshake on my uni bass strings. There are also some amateurish live clips on a MySpace the guitar player’s daughter set up (http://myspace.com/phillybluesmessengers). You can hear me off and on playing out of tune in the background. I wouldn’t use these to advertise any kind of tuning system (and I can’t even swear that I was using any tuning system at the time). But they are a good example of how dangerous a uni can be in the hands of an amateur at the end of a long Saturday night. At my best moments I sound like a bad imitation of Hound Dawg Taylor on a handful of downers.

I vaguely remember learning about ET and JI and the problem with pianos and orchestras while learning theory with piano lessons. I learned more about this when I took up guitar. I mostly don’t tune ET on guitar, but start there (by fretting adjacent lower string at the 5th or 4th fret) and tweak the tonic chord of each song toward JI a little. When I took up slide open tunings (lessons from Fred McDowell), Dobro and steel, I learned I could tune closer to JI than ET. Been there ever since. I’ve always taken my Es from a mouth harp or tuner, and tune everything by ear from there. I got my first chromatic tuner (Boss) a couple of years ago. I still use it only to get my Es, but I’ve used it to check out where I end up by ear, and that one disastrous time I tried everything straight up ET. My experience is the exact opposite of yours. I was a bit shocked when I realized that some younger players tune entirely straight up ET, because they think the meter is God, and they never heard of JI. Buddy doing it doesn’t shock me at all – he has his reasons (same as my piano tuner), knows what he is doing, and can pull it off (gross understatement). Because of these discussions on the Forum, I’ve grazed the internet and read up on JI and ET and the other tuning systems. Your dire warnings of the inevitable conflicts of JI in a pedal steel copedant spurred me to go through the whole tuning of an E9/B6 8&5 uni to find the conflicts. I was pleasantly surprised to find there were none for any of the main chords commonly used, and the few conflicts were in dissonant chords where there were conflicts for JI or ET. This makes sense, because E9 was evolved by ear tuners before chromatic tuners were widely used, and B6 is related as the fifth of E.

Well, there, I’ve spilled my musical guts for you, Eric. But I maintain neither your nor my past experience is particularly relevant to the JI/ET tuning problem. It’s all physics and psychoacoustics. Greater minds than ours have explained it all. But science can’t resolve the problem. It’s all up to our hands and ears, minds and hearts. Still luv ya, Eric. Just can’t hold a grudge over any of this drivel from the two of us. And I never meant to start anything between you and PF or anyone else. Your and my own rude behavior has cooked our own gooses in the presence of class acts like PF and Lloyd.

And, Gary, man do I feel bad for my part in hijacking your thread. But hopefully there’s been a tidbit of interest to you here and there.

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But every single time tuning by ear, or tuning to a JI chart comes up, you jump in with claims that anything but ET is too complicated, and only ET will work, because you’ve used it for xx years, and Buddy uses it, and keyboards use it, lots of guitar players use it, all the meters use it, and so it can’t work to use anything but ET.

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You can play nearly any tuning "system" to sound good. It's in the playing.

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------------------
Bobby Lee (a.k.a. b0b) - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
Williams D-12 E9, C6add9, Sierra Olympic S-12 (F Diatonic)
Sierra Laptop S-8 (E6add9), Fender Stringmaster D-8 (E13, C6 or A6) My Blog

(Bassist Derek Smalls, from the movie "This Is Spinal Tap", unplugging his tuner in the dressing room just before walking on stage.)

After playing solidly and steadily with telecasters, pianos, and fiddles, for about thirty years and doing thousands of paid gigs, I find out it's all physics and psychoacoustics.

I think my inner eric always knew that but never heard it put in those words.

I hope you have, and I wish you the exhuberance you have shown here by your postings, when it comes to your playing. You have a mountain of it.

Probably similar to that that LG PF BE and others have.

Playing Music for me is the one thing that at my death (should that ever happen ) will allow me to know that I have Lived.

Not how I Tuned.

Or even if I did..

The tuning system and the overtones it create do change the tonal balance to my ears (ie bright/dark).