Tune Your Guitar

I can't tell you how important this subject is if you are a musician. Reps will tear you apart no matter how good your songs are if your instruments are not in tune. On the other hand, there are ways of not being tuned properly that can really help your songwriting out. Here are a few ideas you might not have tried.

GET A GOOD TUNER AND USE IT

If you look around at even a local pawnshop, you can get tuners at very reasonable prices. I have a nice one that can tune a number of instruments that tells you what note it played, but not where that note is on the staff-I still have to figure that part out, myself. It will also tell me whether I am sharp or flat so I can adjust the note until it is just right. This is great if you are playing instruments other than a guitar, are trying to sing notes, trying to find out what a note is on a practice tape so you can write it on paper, and so forth. If your instrument isn't in tune, it can throw a lot of people, and make it really hard for some musicians to tell what you are playing. Make sure your batteries are fresh, too-this can make many tuners give you false readings, or give out at a really bad time. Just make sure you have a working tuner, and at least tune your instrument before every gig, and preferably, before each take in the studio-this can save a lot of heartache in the long run.

In previous times, some producers would manually speed up or slow down tapes to make them sound more "powerful", and that also made it really hard for musicians to play along with their albums. Sure, you could say that this helped sheet music sales of their work, but it also made it really hard for musicians to practice that music well because what was coming out of their stereo didn't match what was on the sheet music. As far as I could see, this only helped trading of bootleg live tapes, since many musicians noted that what was on the sheet music and on the album wasn't what they were hearing live. If musicians would just do another take and be in the proper key in the first place, this problem might have never come up, one can't help but think. Nowadays, with digital tuning, even in the studio, this generally isn't a problem, and you can often just "fix" a track by digitally speeding or slowing it until it is right, but once again, if one would just practice outside the studio until one is properly rehearsed to do their job in one or two takes, you save all the production time and don't have to dicker with all these problems in the first place.

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