Tuning Is Obvious, Right?

Yes, I know it seams fairly obvious that you should tune your guitar before you go the big take. That's a given, right? Well, what does tuning your guitar really mean? Does it mean that you should just step on your Boss tuner, make a few adjustments and go. Well, that depends really. If your guitar has perfect intonation and every chord rings out perfectly no matter where you are on the fretboard, then maybe a boss tuner is all you need.

I must admit that when I try to cram most of a record into a weekend, it's EXTREMELY tough to make sure all notes and chords are in tune. The tuning game is tough. It takes an exponentially greater amount of time to get your guitar REALLY in tune than it does to say ?screw it? and start tracking. So why spend the time?

Why You Should Be Anal About Tuning?

I must admit that I'm not a conventional music guy. I didn't take tuba in high school and I thought staccato was some sort of spaghetti. So I don't have any preconceived notions that music SHOULD be this way or that way. I never saw the point of being in mega tune for the sake of being in tune. I've always been the guy who'd rather hear a great song out of tune then a piece of crap in tune. Being raised in the Nirvana generation didn't help either. Some garage bands were big on not tuning...such as Sonic Youth.

The biggest reasons that you should be anal about your tuning is more of an issue of sound quality, in my opinion. When your guitar is going ?wo wo wo? throughout the song, it does something to the tone of your guitar that you simply don't hear on major label cds. I must admit that when I first started this studio years and years ago, there were times when I just thought I was doing it wrong...meaning I messed up on the engineering side of things. Most of the time, an out of tune guitar has a tendency to sound dull. I naturally reached for the parametric EQ and start yanking on 400Hz. Well, guess what! That will not fix it, obviously!

It turns out that I was consistently recording out of tune instruments. When I say ?out of tune? I mean that my ear has grown a zillion over the years and my patience has dwindled. I mean that if a guitar isn't mega mega perfectly in tune, it's unrecordable (unless we are going for some weird noise). I've had countless guitar players who are just fine with a guitar being just barely out of tune. Then when it comes to mixing time, they wonder why there guitar doesn't have that magical major label tone. The answer lies in the fact that in order to get that magical huge tone, a guitar must be in mega perfect mega tuning.

How Do You Deal With Tuning Issues?

The Guitarist

There is no substitute for a great musician playing a well setup guitar. This means that first and foremost the player is responsible. Guitarists have a tendency to smash too hard on D chords. Some guitarists bend the strings in a way that makes chords go out. All guitar players have tendencies that can lead to out of tune chords. Make sure that as a guitar player, that you sound in tune when you practice.

The Guitar

Poorly setup guitars are the second leading cause of mega tuning problems. If a guitar has it's intonation setup properly, it makes recording a million times easier. There is nothing worse that a guitar that sounds great when hitting an open G chord and then miserably out of tune when hitting ?E? bar chord on the 7^th fret of the A string. If you don't get you guitar setup before recording, you are a total moron and I hope your kids get cancer.

The Bass

A lot of times a guitar will sound out of tune and will freak me out. Then I'll solo the guitar track to find out that the guitar is just fine. Hmmm. I'll then solo the bass and here an out of tune mess. This is A BIG PROBLEM. Many big dogs recommend recording the bass last. This is for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason is it is much easier to hear an out of tune guitar than it is an out of tune bass. However, you can easily hear if a bass is out of tune by listening to it with the in-tune guitar tracks.

Tuning To A Specific Chord

I've found that when I'm doing real deal producing with a band, I have to tune the guitar to various chords quite often. Why? Because I'll have a riff with 2,3, or 4 chords and one of the chords will not only sound small and weak, but it will be distracting. I have no problem at all with tuning that one chord to be as in-tune as it possibly can and then overdubbing the part editing in the in-tune guitar.

Conclusion

Tuning makes an enormous impact on your recordings. In the future, I'd like to follow up with some specific tricks to improve the tuning of your recordings as this article was to create awareness at how big of issue tuning is.