I’ve been reading the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for a variety of reasons. One of the ideas I’ve taken out of the book is that idea that, when you’re working on an object, like a motorcycle, or a guitar, your attitude makes all the difference. I bought a new electric guitar back in December. This guitar has what’s called a floating bridge. Normally, the strings of the guitar are anchored at one end by the tuning pegs, and at the other end by the bridge, which is attached to the body of the guitar. A floating bridge isn’t screwed into the solid body of the guitar; it floats on a hinge, held in place by several springs in the back of the guitar. These springs contribute to the resonant frequencies of the guitar. They also allow you to use a whammy bar to perform all kinds of crazy tricks. I can’t get enough of that thing.
What I didn’t know when I purchased the guitar is that a floating bridge makes tuning the guitar much more difficult. Normally, you tune a guitar by increasing tension on the strings by turning the tuning pegs. Each string can be tuned individually to the perfect pitch. This isn’t possible with a floating bridge. Increasing tension on one string pulls the bridge closer to the head of the guitar, slightly lowering the tension on all of the other strings. This means that when you tune one string up, all of the other strings drop slightly in pitch. Conversely, tuning a string down slightly increases the pitch on all of the other strings. Tuning becomes quite the juggling act.
At first, I became really frustrated trying to tune this thing. It was taking way longer than normal, and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. After breaking a new string, I figured it was time to call it a night. This morning, I bought a new set of strings and tried again, but this time, I set about my work feeling more relaxed and almost enjoying the slow, steady process. It still took a long time, but when everything was all tuned up and all the notes were right on pitch, it felt great.
I couldn’t find a decent set of instructions on how to tune a guitar with a floating bridge online, so I figured I’d explain how i did it here, for interested readers. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that drastically changing the tuning on one string is a bad idea; the increased tension on the bridge will significantly lower the pitch on all of the other strings, and if you keep trying to adjust them individually, you’ll gradually raise the bridge until you snap one of your strings.
I made myself a little graphical image of where each string’s pitch was relaltive to what it was supposed to be. I then adjusted the string whose pitch was the worst, but only slightly – by at most a semitone. I then updated the image so that I could see where all of the strings’ pitches were, relative to where they were supposed to be. I kept moving back and forth between different strings, each time selecting the string whose pitch was farthest from what it was supposed to be, and adjusting it slightly towards the goal. Once I was very close, and all of the strings were within a a half semitone of where they’re supposed to be, I tuned the top strings up above their target frequency. That way, when I tuned the lower strings up to correct note, the top strings gradually dropped in pitch. As I got closer and closer to getting the guitar in tune, I made smaller and smaller adjustments. It took a long time, but it worked, and you can’t argue with the end result.