Steveperrywriter
Well-known member
When I started playing guitar, I got an A-440 tuning fork and did the basic string-to-string-listen-for-the-wah-wah method for tuning. Later, I learned the 5/7 harmonic (i.e., another wrong method), because there weren’t any electronic devices. I rememer the first commercial electronic calculators, huge suckers that would add, subtract, divide, and multiply, cost three month’s salary, and were as big as Samsonite suitcases.
My problem then, as now, was that my ear, however accurate it might have been relatively-speaking, was not anybody else’s ear. I could tune the A and then the rest of the intrument from there, strum a few chords to see if any of them sounded okay, and I was done. It might sound okay to me, but if I sat down to play with somebody who had tuned his guitar by this method, sometimes (many times) his guitar and mine didn’t jibe.
Dude, you’re flat.
No, man, your axe is sharp.
What I found with electronic tuners was, if two of us used them, even if we weren’t theoretically perfect, at least we were imperfect in the same way, if that makes any sense …
Speaking here as somebody who plays with words as much as I do the ukulele, I think OregonJim’s initial post and Ceejay’s response suffered from what all of our posts suffer from: Words on paper or a screen are, at best, approximations of a face-to-face conversation, and they lack all those clues we get when we can see facial expression, hear the tone of words, and maybe even pick up on pheromones. A chat over a beer or coffee is way more likely to give you the real sense of what is being said than the back-and-forth of fingers-on-keyboards.
Cool Hand Luke’s Dictum: What we have here is a failure to communicate.
You know what you meant to say, but somebody who reads what you wrote always brings their own axe to the dialog, and what s/he gets might not be what you intended.
Sarcasm and humor are particularly difficult to pull off with the written word. If you can do that consistently, you have useful and marketable skill.
When you offer advice, sometimes it is more useful to begin with something that doesn’t inadvertently push buttons starting off, and you have to be mindful that your audience doesn’t have the same life-experiece you do.
Here’s how OregonJim’s post began:
"There are so many ukulele videos on YouTube, and I've noticed that the vast majority of them are out of tune. Why?
First of all, here's what not to do:
Use your clip-on tuner to tune each open string to G-C-E-A.
This guarantees that you will be playing out-of-tune!"
I can see two ways to take this: Funny, or know-it-all. If you go with funny, then you probably don’t have a problem with it. If you are struck by the other attitude, then not so much.
Funny: That first line is hyperbole, and meant that way. Know-it-all: The line is inaccurate, and sets the tone for the rest of the post. Unless you have seen all the ukulele videos on YouTube, you can’t say that the vast majority of them are out-of-tune, can you? You can say, Well, I’ve seen a hundred of ‘em, and most of ‘em are out-of-tune, least according to my ear. More accurate, but less funny.
If I were casting the rest of this, I might have offered that there are nine-and-sixty ways of tuning, and here’s one that I found to be the most useful/accurate, then laid it out. When you begin with saying what is likely a fair number of your readers are doing is wrong, you start off raising hackles. Few of us like to be told that what we are doing, for whatever reason we do it, is wrong, and not just wrong but guaranteed wrong.
Really? Who the f-word are you to say so?
If you are going to be hyperbolic, then maybe you pull out the stops and go for it, be like an actor without a mike who has to reach the cheap seats. Subtle is harder.
Me, I gave OregonJim the benefit of the doubt here, although his posts have ruffled some feathers before. When I write something and people don’t get it, or disagree with it, I ask myself, 1) Is is me? 2) Is it them? or 3) Is is a combination of both? Usually that last one turns out to be my answer.
--
Steve
My problem then, as now, was that my ear, however accurate it might have been relatively-speaking, was not anybody else’s ear. I could tune the A and then the rest of the intrument from there, strum a few chords to see if any of them sounded okay, and I was done. It might sound okay to me, but if I sat down to play with somebody who had tuned his guitar by this method, sometimes (many times) his guitar and mine didn’t jibe.
Dude, you’re flat.
No, man, your axe is sharp.
What I found with electronic tuners was, if two of us used them, even if we weren’t theoretically perfect, at least we were imperfect in the same way, if that makes any sense …
Speaking here as somebody who plays with words as much as I do the ukulele, I think OregonJim’s initial post and Ceejay’s response suffered from what all of our posts suffer from: Words on paper or a screen are, at best, approximations of a face-to-face conversation, and they lack all those clues we get when we can see facial expression, hear the tone of words, and maybe even pick up on pheromones. A chat over a beer or coffee is way more likely to give you the real sense of what is being said than the back-and-forth of fingers-on-keyboards.
Cool Hand Luke’s Dictum: What we have here is a failure to communicate.
You know what you meant to say, but somebody who reads what you wrote always brings their own axe to the dialog, and what s/he gets might not be what you intended.
Sarcasm and humor are particularly difficult to pull off with the written word. If you can do that consistently, you have useful and marketable skill.
When you offer advice, sometimes it is more useful to begin with something that doesn’t inadvertently push buttons starting off, and you have to be mindful that your audience doesn’t have the same life-experiece you do.
Here’s how OregonJim’s post began:
"There are so many ukulele videos on YouTube, and I've noticed that the vast majority of them are out of tune. Why?
First of all, here's what not to do:
Use your clip-on tuner to tune each open string to G-C-E-A.
This guarantees that you will be playing out-of-tune!"
I can see two ways to take this: Funny, or know-it-all. If you go with funny, then you probably don’t have a problem with it. If you are struck by the other attitude, then not so much.
Funny: That first line is hyperbole, and meant that way. Know-it-all: The line is inaccurate, and sets the tone for the rest of the post. Unless you have seen all the ukulele videos on YouTube, you can’t say that the vast majority of them are out-of-tune, can you? You can say, Well, I’ve seen a hundred of ‘em, and most of ‘em are out-of-tune, least according to my ear. More accurate, but less funny.
If I were casting the rest of this, I might have offered that there are nine-and-sixty ways of tuning, and here’s one that I found to be the most useful/accurate, then laid it out. When you begin with saying what is likely a fair number of your readers are doing is wrong, you start off raising hackles. Few of us like to be told that what we are doing, for whatever reason we do it, is wrong, and not just wrong but guaranteed wrong.
Really? Who the f-word are you to say so?
If you are going to be hyperbolic, then maybe you pull out the stops and go for it, be like an actor without a mike who has to reach the cheap seats. Subtle is harder.
Me, I gave OregonJim the benefit of the doubt here, although his posts have ruffled some feathers before. When I write something and people don’t get it, or disagree with it, I ask myself, 1) Is is me? 2) Is it them? or 3) Is is a combination of both? Usually that last one turns out to be my answer.
--
Steve
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