Every string is green
on the tuner.
You strum the open chord
and it is lovely.
Then you play the riff
up at the seventh fret
and something is off.
Not wrong notes.
Sour ones.
You assume it is your hands.
You press lighter.
You practise it slower.
You start to believe
you have a bad ear
for anything above the fifth fret.
The tuner only checked
the open strings.
It said nothing about
the rest of the neck,
and the rest of the neck
is where you play.
The length of each string
has to be set
so that the note at the twelfth fret
is exactly an octave
above the open string.
That setting is called intonation,
and it drifts.
New strings of a different gauge.
A winter of central heating,
then a damp summer.
A neck that has bowed a little
since the shop set it up.
Strings that are simply old,
dull and uneven,
no longer vibrating
the way the maths assumes.
None of it shows
while the guitar
is lying in its case.
All of it shows
in the one passage
you have decided
you are bad at.
Here is the check,
and it takes a minute.
Tune the open string.
Play the harmonic at the twelfth fret.
Then fret the same note
and look at the tuner.
If the fretted note
is sharp or flat,
it is not you.
It is the instrument,
and a screwdriver
or a technician
sorts it out in an afternoon.
Change the strings
before they sound dead,
not after.
Get a proper setup
once a year,
or whenever the weather
turns hard on the wood.
This is not a case for new gear.
The guitar you have is fine.
It needs looking after,
the same way a player does.
The cruel part is
how long you can spend
blaming yourself
for a fault in the wood and the wire,
practising harder
at something no practice
will ever fix.
So when a passage
will not come right
however slowly you play it,
check the instrument
before you check yourself.
Your hands deserve a fair test.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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