Richard Jernigan -> RE: Tuning our guitars (Feb. 19 2019 1:37:17)
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Great video Ricardo! Over the years I've read or been told a lot of stuff about tuning a guitar. I ended up tuning mine the way you show here. The idea of compensation, or so I've been told by a few luthiers, is that as you move up the fretboard, you push the string down further to fret it--so the notes tend to go sharp. The the bridge is set back so the countervailing tendency is to go flat as you go up the fretboard. The setback is a bigger and bigger fraction of the free string length. Flamenco guitars, with their low action need little or no compensation. Over the 57 years I've been playing, the setup of classicals has gotten lower and lower, from the insane action heights that Segovia used (and I think Kazuhito Yamashita still uses on his Ramirez, which he plays un-amplified in fairly large rooms) to the more reasonable actions of today, around 4mm max on the 6th string to around 3mm on the first, sometimes even lower. So logically, the compensation setback on classicals should have decreased as well. But the few I have measured have been all over the place. The lowest action classical I have is set up in the flamenco range. It's the easiest of the classicals to play in tune, even though the maker insists on high tension strings. But as you point out, you still have to be careful how you set your fingers down on the strings, and you may have to push or pull a little as they drift out of tune. I don't remember measuring the compensation, if any. I have a 1991 Manuel Contreras Sr. "doble tapa" whose bridge is actually set forward about 1 1/2 millimeters. That is, it's 325mm from the nut to the 12th fret and about 323 1/2mm from the 12th fret to the bridge saddle. Action is about 4mm/3mm, but it's still not that hard to play in tune with normal tension strings. RNJ
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