Garry Sharp said:
Brad - thanks for that last post, that was new to me. But....
How important is tuning anyway? What I mean is, for example, I was a huge fan of the Talking Heads, but David B always sang a quarter tone flat. Didn't seem to matter, their Stop Making Sense DVD is one of the greatest live DVD's I've seen. But he played more recently, post Heads, at the Union Chapel, in Islington where I live, and watching that show on TV last night, where he had a string section, his singing was painful to listen to, even though the same voice as Talking Heads.
Keith Richards is always out of tune. Reference the joke earlier in this (entertainingly long
) thread about two fretless bassists - how in tune is an orchestra? I used to play the trombone as a teenager and I dread to think....but we played some quite big festivals and it never seemed to matter
(PS - talk about milking - should we take up dairy fariming
)
I agree that we've just about milked this thing above and beyond the point of all reason. (Which, I suppose, was the whole point.)
Anyway, I do think you bring up an excellent point. Just how important IS exact, fanatically accurate tuning,
anyway. That's one heck of a salient question, IMHO. This could be asked of any instrument, I suppose, not just the bass. But, since the thread was originally started to address the issue of bass guitar tuning (before we just got crazy silly with it, I mean), let's talk about how that applies to bass, for a moment. (And please pardon the long post that will be required to thoughtfully discuss this issue.)
As I mentioned in the post that you were referring to, when you look at the different bands on a strobe tuner, which are moving at varying speeds, this is telling you how close the different harmonics are to being in tune, as well as the fundamental. Then we have the simpler method which has already been discussed here, where you simply use any old tuner to adjust the string length of the bass to the point where the fundamental and the octave note are in tune. Then you just call it "good enough," and don't worry about whether the
other harmonics are in tune. Well, let's think about this for a moment. What if they're not? I mean, what can you actually
do about it? Notice that tou CAN'T alter the string length at the bridge, or that would put the fundamental and the first harmonic out of tune, and these are probably the most important ones to
have in tune. About the only thing you could do to try to get more of the harmonic series in tune would be to try a different string, to see if that string does a better job. Because, let's face it, once you've tuned the octave and the fundamental, then you are as close to being in "perfect tune" (in terms of intonation) as
that particular string is going to get. And most bass players I know, myself included, choose strings on the basis of how good they sound on a particular bass, not on the basis of technical data such as how well the harmonic series stays in tune for a particular bass. (It would be the same for any other bass built on that same scale, I would think.)
Furthermore, there is a limit to how far you can go with this, ANYWAY. This gets into some very, very complex stuff. But, essentially, what it comes down to is that any musical tone, whether it generates sound by vibrating a string, a membrane, or a column of air, creates harmonic overtones that are simple multiplications of the fundamental. So, if the fundamental is designated by
f (which is the standard notation), then the overtones will be
f x 2,
f x 3,
f x 4, and so on. These are mathmatically pure multiples of the fundamental. However, (and this is where things get complicated), our twelve tone "tempered scale" -- the plain, old 12 tone harmonic scale that we all use to make music with, is not so mathmatically pure. That is to say that the harmonics of a given note match up
approximately, but not
exactly with the tones of the 12 tone Western scale. That means that nothing will EVER be
perfectly in tune, in terms of having both the fundamental and ALL OF THE HARMONICS in tune at the same time. It just can't happen. Indeed, I suspect that it is these little imperfections that give music character, and make it interesting. Which is why I, personally, don't approve of the
overuse of various techniques that are used to suck the character from music and make it overly "homogenized." This can involve the use of compressors to slam the shit out of the dynamics, or those godawful auto-tune devices that are used to "correct" less than perfect pitch. Good music, passionately performed, has
all kinds of "imperfections." And, personally, I think we should leave them there, for the most part. (Unless they are just plain offensive sounding, in which the performance should be done over.) In other words, "passion over perfection" would be my musical philosophy.
Brad
