MarkPNeyer.com

Two years ago I treated myself to a new guitar. This guitar, the RG-4-EX-1, has what’s called a ‘floating bridge’. It allows you to go nuts with the whammy bar, while still keeping the guitar in tune. That’s good. The downside of a floating bridge is that the guitar becomes much, much harder to tune.  I tuned it for just the second time this morning, and this time things went much more smoothly than they did the last time. I thought I’d share some tips for tuning such a guitar, because when I did a Google search I didn’t find a decent article explaining how to do it.

A floating bridge is different from a normal bridge because it is not connected solidly to the body of the guitar – it ‘floats’ on a hinge. On the back of the guitar there are springs connected to the bridge; the tension between these springs in the back and the strings of the guitar balance out, holding the bridge roughly in place.  Because the bridge floats, increasing the tension on one string pulls the entire bridge closer to the neck of the guitar, decreasing the tension in all of the other strings. This means you can’t tune the guitar one string at a time – if you try that, the first string you tune will fall out of tune by the time you get to the last string.

How do you tune the guitar? First, use an appropriately sized Allen wrench to remove the screws holding the locking plates in place at the top of the neck. My guitar is Japanese, so I had to use a metric set of Allen wrenches. I found that out the hard way.  Once you have the locking plates off, loosen the fine-tuning screws almost all the way. Normally the guitar falls down out of tune as the strings stretch out over time, so you want to give yourself plenty of space to increase the tension on the strings.  If you’re replacing the strings, you want to replace them one at a time; taking them all out of the guitar at once will release all of the tension on the springs in the back, and make your life that much more difficult.

You’re going to need a decent tuner.  I used my new Macbook to tune the guitar, with a handy little program called (oddly enough) Guitar Tuner.  The nice thing about the problem is that it shows you how far away your current string is from the note you want it to be – that’s important.

First, get the guitar roughly in tune – i.e. get all of the strings within a few semitones of their proper tuning. When you’re doing this, you want to alternate which string you tune. Don’t just go e-B-G-D-A-E; alternate from the bottom to the top of the neck: E-e-A-B-D-G.

Once you have the guitar roughly in tune, you’re going to follow this iterative process over and over until your guitar is in tune: Strum each of the strings one at a time, and note how out of tune it is.  Choose the string that is the most out of tune, and bring it closer to the right tune - not all the way, just a little bit; at most one semitone. Repeat.

The last part is key; don’t tune each string all the way, or you’ll change the tuning on the other strings too much. By tuning each string just a little at a time, you give the other strings time to adjust to the change you’ve made. Hopefully you found this information useful.

I play guitar. Not very well, but I do play. I started in 2001, and was always sort of an off-and-on player, picking it up now and then. After breaking up with Megan in 2006, I had more free time so I started playing guitar more. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Joe Satriani. Right away I knew I loved the guy, and I quickly obtained all of his music. I started playing guitar more and more.

I bought an accoustic and learned some kind of sing-alongy sort of music over the summer, because that kind of stuff can be fun, and I’d always wanted to learn to play the eels. Twoards the end of the summer, though, I got back into the rock / metal genre. I listened to Joe religiously and started trying (very poorly) to play some of his stuff. I rediscovered Megadeth, particulary the older albums when Mary Friedman was playing for them, and realized that this guy knew his stuff. At first I wasn’t so hot on his solo albums, and I’d forgotten about them until I picked them up again this week.

It strikes me how very different the two arists are. I’m not sure if I feel like I sound more like Satriani because I listened to him first and he’s had more time to influence my playing style, or simply because there’s something about me the makes me more like Satriani than Friedman.

In any case, I was just listening to ‘Music For Speeding’, a Marty Friedman album. He’s good. I really recommend it. If you can handle it. You know. If you’re not metal, then forget it. I’d like to incorporate more of his style into my playing. I decided the other day that the music produced in the future will be amazing compared to our music today, because the artists of the future will have had more sources from which to draw inspiration.

There’s some weird bug affecting the way my site is displayed in firefox. For some reason, the background image occaisionally gets ‘corrupted’ and gains a little speck or line on it. Always in the same location, and this speck is still there when you do a ‘view image’, so i know it’s got nothing to do with CSS. The weird thing is, if you right click on the image and do a ’save as’, it is stored correctly on the local machine. If you do a’ copy image’, though, the defect is copied. That means there’s probably an error somewhere in the code that transfers and image into a surface buffer for displaying. Huh.

Yet again, I miss Harvey Mudd College. I’m still in a good mood, though.

that is all.

I made it fresh tonight. It is called ‘Los Alamos‘ because I was offered a job there today, and I think the place sounds pretty cool.

I need to get better at naming my songs…

I made a new song today.

I would say that I ‘wrote’ it except that there was no writing involved. So I just say that I made it.

Live, from my basement, I present to you: Mauled by Bears.

I figured I’d record myself practicing a bit and see what came out. I hope you like it. If you don’t then I hope you get mauled by a bear or something.