The Steel Guitar Forum

WHEN I LOWER MY E ON 4TH STRING IT COMES BACK SHARP?

Two thoughts...

1. It's normal.
If the E note starts with the needle straight up on your tuner, then after lowering and releasing it is just a tad sharp, and then if you hit your E to F lever and release it is back to straight up again, this is normal.

2. When you lower it, look underneath and watch the spring for that string move when you lower then release.
Does it come all the way back to where it started from?
If not, tighten it a little.
That should fix it.

THANKS PETE!I will check it out after work. Mike

Sharp by how much? 2-4 cents is normal for most guitars, and can be ignored. Appreciably more means the guitar isn't the best...or it's been "over-tuned".

Maybe the roller nut at the headstock needs lubricating.

Do you have a "return compensator" on your 4th string......usually with a black nylon tuning nut.

Thanks guys for the input!!!

everybody always mentions being sharp or flat by 'cents'. after 40 years of steel tuning, i've only dealt with tuners that mark 'hertz' readings.
how does a cent compare, and why does everyone refer to them?

Chris, every tuner I've seen has a dial calibrated in cents, or hundredths of a semitone.
Looking at a chart of frequencies of notes, you can see that frequency seems so profoundly silly. The difference between A4 (440) and G#4 (415.30) is smaller, at 24.7 Hz, than between A4 and A#4 (466.16), at 26.16.
There's around, but not exactly, 4 times as many cents as Hz between notes.
And anyone who says they, for example, tune C# at 436 or 437, just sound silly to my ears. 437 is a flattened A, ain't no part of C#. Sure, I know that they actually mean "C# of ET, provided you move the reference point from 440 to 437," but since to the entire rest of the country (I'm told Europe and Asia use a different reference, and I'm not in the mood to research that point, so I won't say "world), A is 440. So it makes more sense to say "I tune my Bs 4% sharp, my C# 17% flat et cetera", at least to me.
The old Petersen strobe tuners measured in cents, that's what the "vernier" knob did, moved the stability point in hundredths of a semitone (or fret, if you like that term better)
What tuners do you use that don't use cents?
EDIT: I got my frequency chart here: www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html
I think most people discuss cents deviation from 440 instead of reference point is twofold: 1) I think it makes more sense (possibly only because it's what I've always used) and 2), most tuners calibrate the needle in cents.
The only tuner I have that displays frequency (Cleartune) displays the actual frequency of the note: do NOT tell me of an E at 442, that's useless, my E is 329.6 or 164.18

i've always used the boss TU12 or whatever and i thought the marks were Hz.
so a cent is 1% of a fret basically. that's what i never understood. thanks.

The TU-12 has a Cents guage, but it is pretty much unusable because it is too small to distiguish Cents with much accuracy.
Most Seiko tuners have a digital "Cents" readout. I like the SAT-800.
I like to use Larry Bells S12U Cents tuning chart: http://www.larrybell.org/id32_m.htm

Right. The little marks are cents, or "centifrets".
Some tuners have another line of marks, labelled in Hz, but they usually label them clearly, such as "442" appearing at just to the left of where the big dial would show "+10" and "436" just to the right of where most of us tune C#. But most tuners don't have that scale, just as most (nearly all) speedometers only have MPH and km/H, ignoring Knots or Kilofurlongs/fortnight.