anyone who knnows alot about guitar tone

[mastermindmatthews3436]

hey i just got my martin d-35, i love the hell out of it and the guy at the store i bought it from would do anythgin i wanted to it for free, so i was curious, if you raise or lower the action does it affect the tone of the guitar at all??? thanks for any help yall can give

[grock]

hey i just got my martin d-35, i love the hell out of it and the guy at the store i bought it from would do anythgin i wanted to it for free, so i was curious, if you raise or lower the action does it affect the tone of the guitar at all??? thanks for any help yall can give

it's arguable. if it does it is so little you'd never notice it unless you were amplified and loud to pick up on it.

cuz the strings have a different angle over the saddle and pull on the top different. but really it is like so little different that i don't think it will matter.

[grock]

plus it's a martin. so even if you hot-glued sequins all over it, you couldn't mess up that tone.

[Appfro]

plus it's a martin. so even if you hot-glued sequins all over it, you couldn't mess up that tone.

lol, true. but that would make for one ugly martin

[DustyDave]

true. but that would make for one ugly martin

Thats true too

[mastermindmatthews3436]

hah yeh thanks for the replies, i liek it withotu the superglue hah but yeh i will see, thanks for the info

[Jay]

lower action makes for better intonation, because the strings get bent less when you fret them

[grock]

lower action makes for better intonation, because the strings get bent less when you fret them

unless the guitars neck was set with higher action in mind in which case lower action would cause all of your fretted notes to be flat.

intonation should not be set by action.

if you are having intonation problems you can design a saddle appropraitely to compensate. i have 2 saddles for my big guitar: one for light strings and one for medium strings. and each was made by stringing up the guitar and playing notes then taking it apart and lightly sanding. i spent like 2 hourse on each.

But i am a stickler for intonation. we could talk all day about how dissapointing the guitar is at intonation. check out this link but be warned, the understanding of tuning and intonation could really upset you.

http://www.endino.com/archive/tuningnightmares.html

[Jay]

or that too.

i guess it'd be more of an issue of a straight neck than action, right? because if the neck is severely bowed, then the action is lower in some areas, and the areas where it is higher will be sharp where the low action places will be flat.....or ?

and that article is very interesting. tuning drives me nuts sometimes because the G on my les paul is never in tune.

i love the taylor tuners though...so accurate.

[Jay]

ah....the article explained why my G is always out....this DOES really upset me!@

Here's where it gets hairy. In our 12-tone Western scale, where all the notes are equally spaced, no pair of them are exactly in a 1.2 or 1.25 ratio. If you pull out your calculator and multiply 1.05946 by itself a few times, you'll land on 1.189 and, next, 1.2599! The first one is actually 15 cents flat from where your ears will want a minor third to be, and the second is 14 cents sharp from where a major third should be! So if you tune a chord that includes a major third "by ear" until it sounds perfect, that same chord with a minor third substituted in it will be 29 cents out of tune... almost a third of a half-step. (Cue: wailing and gnashing of teeth.)

this is a cool article...i hear this stuff sometimes when i play and it always made me feel like i couldn't tune the guitar right and i just sucked, but i guess it's just a fact of life.

[grock]

ah....the article explained why my G is always out....this DOES really upset me!@

Here's where it gets hairy. In our 12-tone Western scale, where all the notes are equally spaced, no pair of them are exactly in a 1.2 or 1.25 ratio. If you pull out your calculator and multiply 1.05946 by itself a few times, you'll land on 1.189 and, next, 1.2599! The first one is actually 15 cents flat from where your ears will want a minor third to be, and the second is 14 cents sharp from where a major third should be! So if you tune a chord that includes a major third "by ear" until it sounds perfect, that same chord with a minor third substituted in it will be 29 cents out of tune... almost a third of a half-step. (Cue: wailing and gnashing of teeth.)

this is a cool article...i hear this stuff sometimes when i play and it always made me feel like i couldn't tune the guitar right and i just sucked, but i guess it's just a fact of life.

see and now it begins. you'll be listening to some old Hendrix or beatles or anything and you'll start to notice that all those guitars are out of tune. not by much but when you are looking for it, it's there.

so so annoying to know this.

[Jay]

it's already annoying. last night i was trying to tune my taylor and the open D sounded great, but the xx7655 A chord sounded all warbly. i went and bought new strings today hoping that it will help some. old strings are bastards...

i've always noticed that fretted instruments sound a bit like they are out of tune sometimes, at least now i know why...though it will annoy me forever.

[t41]

http://www.endino.com/archive/tuningnightmares.html

ouch.

[grock]

http://www.endino.com/archive/tuningnightmares.html

ouch.

i'm sorry!

[sunglassesatnight]

Yeah grock that one did hurt.