Uniting with Sound: Pitch

A tuning lesson given through prose

“Instruments are so hard to tune,” he thought. He had been fiddling with the tuning pegs for hours now and it was no closer to being in tune than when he started. He didn’t know what was wrong but he could tell that the sound of him strumming the guitar sounded horrible. He wasn’t one to lose hope easily though. He kept at it, using only his ear as a guide to tell him what to do, not that he was being told much at the moment.

His laptop began playing the familiar tone of the video call. He accepted it excitedly and sat facing the image of his teacher waving a huge hello. It was his second lesson with this teacher.

“Hi! How do your fingers feel now?” his teacher asked.

“Sore, but I avoided practicing too much like you had said. I’ve been trying to tune this guitar without the electronic tuner, but I’m getting nowhere.”

“That’s alright. You can use the tuner for now. We can spend time on something more fun than tuning so you don’t get bored.”

“I was wondering…can we only focus on tuning this time? I’m not bored by it in the least. The fact that I can’t even tune a guitar to start with makes me feel like this must be the first step to play.”

“Haha! You’re the first person to volunteer to learn tuning so early. Yeah, you’re right about it being the first step to music. Recognising pitches accurately is like learning to recognise words in a language,” his teacher explained.

She continued with a smile, “Alright, if you’re truly interested in getting to this first, let’s do it your way. Hopefully the enthusiasm doesn’t die by the end of the lesson.”

“To understand tuning, you need to first know about consonance. Before that though, tell me why you feel your guitar isn’t in tune,” the teacher said.

“I don’t know what it is exactly but it sounds bad. It’s like someone not being able to sing well.”

“That’s good enough for a start,” the teacher said reassuringly, ”Let’s do this through sound though. Listen to what I play now. I might play any number of notes at once. Tell me how many I’m playing. And no looking at my guitar.”

He waited with eyes closed for his teacher to play. He heard it. It was one long, sustained sound. He opened his eyes once the sound had faded.

“That was one note, I think.”

“Well, in a sense, yes,” said the teacher with a small nod, ”but I actually played two strings simultaneously. I was playing the same note on both of them — D, but they were in unison. Listen to how one string played on the same pitch sounds now.”

He watched his teacher play the open D string. This time though, the sound didn’t feel as loud and full as the before. The brightness he perceived earlier was lost.

“I can tell by your face that you heard the difference,” his teacher said laughing. He continued, “The reason what you heard before was louder, or to use a better term, more resonant, is because it was two notes and not one. These two notes were at the same pitch, and the sound they could make together was much louder than if two dissonant notes were played together.”

The teacher shifted in her seat and put her hands on her guitar again. She turned one of the tuning pegs a little and looked back into the camera, “Now listen to this.”

He looked at his teacher’s hands while she played the D and A strings. A jarring dissonant sound came through his headphones.

“Hahaha! Not pleasant was it?” the teacher asked him jovially, “I know how that feels. My teacher did the same thing to me. So how many notes were there now?”

He said with a confused expression, “I saw you play two notes but I heard just one sound. It wasn’t fun for sure.”

“What you heard is actually two very slightly dissimilar notes. With time, you’ll be able to tell them apart, but you can focus on the overall sound for now. Listen to it again and try finding something special about it.”

She played again and this time he could hear a kind of beating, a woom-woom-woom kind of sound that accompanied the notes.

“What was that?” he asked, “I heard this beating pulse in the sound.”

“Wonderful! You could tell. That’s exactly what makes this sound so special. When two notes are different, you can hear an additional beating as well. That’s how we tell that two pitches are not exactly the same. I should tell you — this is very important when it comes to tuning,” said the teacher animatedly.

She continued explaining, “The closer you bring two pitches together, the slower the beating becomes, until you can’t hear it at all. This is when both pitches have become the same. Of course, if you overshoot and separate them in the other direction, the beating starts again and progressively becomes faster as the pitches go further apart.

“The point where two pitches equalise and the beating stops is where good tuning lives. The similarity in pitch leading to resonance is called consonance. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to tell one pitch from another. This doesn’t apply only to the guitar. Any pitched instrument can sound resonant or dissonant when playing others.

“You can think of music as an imitation game. You have to perfectly copy a pitch, especially when playing with others, to be in tune. When you feel your guitar is sounding bad, what you mean is that the open string pitches aren’t resonating well with each other. Of course, each string has its own different pitch, but only when these pitches line up the way you want them to, will they sound good to you.”

He was smiling. He asked, “So that’s it? All I need to do is copy really well and I can sound great?”

“It sounds simple,” she warned, “but it is no easy feat. The best of the best take years to perfect their pitch skills. The more you progress, the better you’re able to see that there’s a lot more to be done to be one of the greats.

“Hey! But that’s a good thing,” she said, looking at his let-down face, “The journey for getting there is a great one too. You can learn so much and make so much fantastic music. One step at a time though. All you need to think about now is resonance. You already know what consonance sounds like so you can try tuning two strings to the same note for a start.

“You can see how the beating become slower and slower as the two pitches come closer, and disappears entirely at a certain point. This is when both notes are in unison. That’s a word you’ll hear a lot — unison. It means two notes are exactly the same.

“Once you get a hang of tuning two strings to the same pitch, we can move on to tuning strings to different pitches. I think you have enough on your plate for now though, don’t you think?”

He nodded in agreement, “Oh yes. This is a lot of information for now. And I really need to get this right before moving on to anything else.”

“Well, we still have some time on our hands. I guess we can move on to what we were playing last time. You’ll have to tune first though. The tuner is good enough while I’m around,” she said.

She began to play the main theme of Asturias while he went to fetch his tuner.

_/\_

Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.

Improve your sense of rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) as you read about my journey through the world of rhythm. How’s that for combining a lesson and a story into one? :D

Get a better grasp on notes with my 3-part How I learned to speak with notes series: Melody, Harmony and Connection

You might even find these interesting:
How I use music to remember phone numbers, A Recipe for Music and The Voice of a Story

You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh