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Tell me about intonation

Johnstinkpants

By Johnstinkpants
in Electric Guitars

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MASQUE Newbie

MASQUE

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Originally posted by Johnstinkpants

Yeah yeah I'm a noob


I don't know that much about guitars...what does intonation mean in relation to guitars and how important is it? Is it something to do with the guitar being in tune with itself all up the fretboard?

 

 

Pretty much so........but a guitar has a tempered scale, it is adjusted to fit a fretted neck, making every half tone the same relative frequency lenght (the same distance from C to C# as from B to C, for example) while the real scale is not quite so evenly divided. Because of this, a guitar can only be in relative pitch along it's whole range, tuned to a chord, or tuned for a certain playing position, otherwise it is always slightly off (many people don't hear this slight offness, others are driven mad from it).

 

But intonating makes the 12th fret note exactly an octave from the open string note, having all the half steps between fall over the frets, higher action needs different intonation because the string stretches more to get to the fret, the exact placement would be if the string would lie straight over the frets which is impossible because of the physics of vibrating strings, they need room to vibrate.

 

Intonation compensates for this last fact, consider a square triangle; the base is the ideal flat plane of the fretboard and the frets are spaced to get every half tone (tempered) between the open string and it's octave, but since the string is actually a hypothenus (at least in approximation) to the plane of the fretboard it isn't quite there and the saddle adjustments compensate for the distance (actually, the stretch the string goes through to be fretted) between the ideal fret place and the change of pitch the string gets because it has to be stretched down to the fret.

 

If we could have strings made of light, they would be perfectly intonated (tempered scale accounted for) if the frets are correctly spaced and they would lie perfectly along the plane of the frets.

 

Good intonation is important because it helps have barre chords, for instance, be in tune at the first fret as well as the 7th or 14th, etc.

 

A poorly intonated instrument may give you an in tune chord at the 9th fret, but then you go down to the first position and it will sound out of tune. So you retune for the out of tune chord but the problem zips around.

 

Older crusty strings kill intonation because of the different diameters it creates at different parts of the strings, either because of added finger gunk or parts of the string wearing out so if all of a sudden your guitar that usually played well in tune starts sounding off, strings are the easiest and most succeptible culprit to look at.

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tlbonehead Newbie

tlbonehead

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Originally posted by Johnstinkpants

Yeah yeah I'm a noob


I don't know that much about guitars...what does intonation mean in relation to guitars and how important is it? Is it something to do with the guitar being in tune with itself all up the fretboard?

Well ya. Its a lot easier than fine-tuning the fret locations.

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MASQUE Newbie

MASQUE

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Originally posted by tlbonehead

Well ya. Its a lot easier than fine-tuning the fret locations.

 

 

that has been done thought, with mini segmented frets but i have no idea how playable it is. Bends should be {censored}ty.

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