The subject of guitar tuning came up when I was on the phone with a state employee. The subject at hand had to do with my welfare in the following months. Out of respect for this employee I can get no more specific but it was truly an interesting experience. Very quickly the subject went on to guitar playing. It turns out that this person had learned to play the guitar but gave it up due to lack of time. I also found out that he never learned how to tune the guitar so I gave him a lesson about this over the phone.
This experience led me to think about the beginning guitar student and what it must be like to face all the challenges of playing. Probably many times the subject of tuning might get neglected in preference for other things like learning chord shapes or rhythm. Many times it seems it is about developing new habits and getting past the initial finger pain that the fretboard causes. Watching others play with ease and realizing that your own initial playing is anything but might be a frustrating experience. All these thoughts circled my mind as I attempted to think about something that I always took for granted: tuning the guitar. It might be good to explore this subject for the benefit of the new guitar player.
I quickly learned that since I last looked at this subject there has been a tremendous development in technology. Also, there were technologies that were always there but I never knew about; specifically the strobe tuner. This then led me to think about the history of pitch and where it was first conceived of, different tuning environments, different instrumentalists who use tuners and so on. Orchestral tuning is a subject that I look forward to pursuing. Today's technology has strived to meet all these demands in needs and requirements.
While initially I was thinking about the new guitar player it became very evident to me that I was the beginner. I learned about those who used alternate tunings like Elizabeth Cotton. The Smithsonian has a wonderful picture of her playing the guitar upside down with unrecognizable chord patterns. Harpo Marx also had a unique tuning to his harp which was fortunate because apparently his many road trips would have caused damage to a properly tuned harp. Joni Mitchell is known to use over a hundred tunings and I am presuming she extended this ability to her dulcimer playing. These are people who have not been limited to the standard chromatic sense of pitch.
Rather than the subject of guitar tuning (which has then extended into instrument tuning) being a short paragraph in a bigger history, it is more like looking at a piece of musical heritage, history and culture that has extended to and begun from the beginnings of time and culture. This subject extends back to Pythagorus and his monochord and even further back, to the Chinese and 'equal temperament'. Today we have all sorts of musical environments, we have the chromatic scale and diatonic scale. We have technology derived from other technologies to meet this need.It has been fun to look at all this and it is clear that these pursuits are only the beginning.
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