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Posted by: gibsonmatte May 3 2010, 02:39 PM

Hi Marcus,

First of all great lesson regarding intonation and fine tuning!

However one thing popped into mind when watching this.
I know for a fact that one of my guitars, also my main guitar, isn't that great regarding intonation. I will be sure to sort this out as soon as possible and watch your lesson while doing it. However, since we sometimes mess around with the tunings in the band I wondered if this "messes" up the intonation much? For some songs we use drop D tuning but for like 80% of the songs standard Eb is the way I tune my guitar.

So, rather frequently tuning the guitar to drop D, does this mess with the intonation much? Is it necessary to perhaps always keep one guitar in standard Eb tuning and one guitar in drop D tuning?

Thanks as always for great lessons Marcus!

Posted by: Marcus Siepen May 7 2010, 07:12 PM

Lets put it like this: If you have more than one guitar, then the perfect solution would be to use one in your standard tuning and the other one for the drop d, like this you could set the intonation for both guitars according to the tunings. But assuming you only have that one guitar, I would not change the intonation all the time. I would set it to the tuning in which you use it the most and then live with the fact that in the other tuning the guitars intonation is not perfect anymore, but it just doesn't make sense to adjust it over and over again. (And live it would not be possible anyway, you can't stop a gig just to change your guitars intonation).

Posted by: fkalich May 7 2010, 07:38 PM

Or get one of the new LP's that just came out.

http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric-Guitars/Les-Paul/Gibson-USA/Les-Paul-Standard-2010-Limited/Features.aspx

Actually for new variations, I think this one is not bad. Except that the neck is slim taper, I prefer the 50's. And it is chambered, I prefer a 9 to 9.5 lb LP. And for the fact that if you resale the more Bizarro world (and I mean that in the nicest way) LP's you will always take a loss, now or into the future, when you can get a traditional LP at a good price and sale it for nearly as much as you paid for it. And the fact that it costs as much or more than a custom shop LP. Other than those items, this impresses me more than most of the variations have.

edit: I am assuming the guitar will have a street cost of over $4,000. You can get a Custom or an R8 for significantly less than that.

Posted by: Marcus Siepen Jun 2 2010, 12:56 PM

Oh, I didn't see those ones yet, so they put the tronical on other guitars too now. Well, it works for sure and would help to change the tuning in seconds, it doesn't change your intonation though, so going from standard e to c can be done very quickly, you will have the same problems though as if you would tune the guitar manually, the intonation is not adjusted by the tronical system. Aside form that, nice guitar ;-)