The Steel Guitar Forum

This week I arranged a tune in Leavitt tuning that has several bar slants in it. Bar slants are not my strong point when it comes to intonation. I've been working on really LISTENING for THAT in tune sound when I do them. I also have started leaving my clip on tuner turned on and playing each note individually and adjusting the slant until all the notes are in tune.

Not sure I'll ever get to perfection with this, but I figure it's worth spending time on.

How did you guys with great intonation get there?

The same way you get to Carnegie Hall; practice, practice, practice.
Erv

I would say that one should focus on playing slants on non-adjacent strings first, using the sixths interval. Learn sixths on every pair of strings that you can before you move on to more acute slants like thirds.

Another thing I did once was ask someone to calculate the slant angles on the neck as you move up and down the frets. Someone did this for me, and while I didn’t memorize it or anything, it gives me a really solid idea of what the angle should look like on different parts of the neck. I feel really comfortable with my slanting abilities and this did help.

https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtop ... nts+angles

Practicing against a drone can also be helpful for single note intonation. You really hear those beats in the waveform if you're off pitch. Here's a D; lots of other drone videos on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLdxTWauKn8

I need to dig out the graphs that I posted in the thread Mike linked and move them over to my website. I retired from my full-time teaching gig and no longer use the website I was using back then. I backed everything up before I took stuff down, just need to find them.

As I said in a recent post, I don't really think about slants when I move the bar over the fret position, because I cannot see the frets. I am listening at that point, and I don't see how a knowledge of angles would help. In A6th there is a 9th chord I really like. It is on the 2nd and third strings (7 and 9th), and one fret back on the 5th string (5th). I suppose it has a lot to do with how quickly you recognise the harmony or lack there-of.

OR - a method I'm quite adept at - just learn to be OK playing out of tune......

Sorry, that note on the 5th string is a 3rd. I tend to use vibrato to fudge it.

Just do it, and it'll come. It's a matter of not merely developing hand/eye coordination, but developing hand/eye/ear coordination. Wider string spacing helps. On 6-string instruments, it's easier (for me at least) to make slants on typical Gibsons, Rics, and Maggies than on Fenders and Valcos, for example.

Note John Ely's proviso on line 1 of the slant angle calculator. "This is for Geeks and Collectors." Personally, I am not much of a multi-tasker. I cannot imagine that in playing a tune I would be able to remember the angle for every possible position and try to listen if they were in tune at the same time.

A certain "MASTER OF TOUCH AND TONE" told me on more than one occasion,to give it a little more slant as more often than not we tend to not have enough slant initially.Also, when you add in the vibrato in the right spots you will sound more in tune.
Aloha!

It isn’t about memorizing all the angles but more about being prepared to lay the bar down as close as possible in certain areas of the guitar depending on the spacing of the notes across the neck and vertically. It gives me much greater confidence and less time fiddling around to get it in tune. With my group, I actually do a lot of chord comping behind other soloists and about 50% of my chording involves slanting because I don’t like to slide the same chord inversion all over the neck.

I'm still a relative newcomer at slants, but it seems that if you practice regularly playing them in tune you will eventually get it. I have found this to be the case with double stops on violin and with string bends on standard guitar. You have to listen, think and put in the time to do the reps.

I use a tuner to locate the most correct pitches. Then carefully observe what it looks like. Practice reproducing the same sound by sight and ear. I asked Mike Auldridge once if a blind person could learn Dobro and he thought it might be difficult because we use or sight to move from one position to the next an then focus on intonation. If only I were half as talented .

I suppose there are some blind steelers out there, but I would think they would need some physical indication of where they were on the neck. With the fiddle, we don't look at the neck, but there are subtle indications of position in the taper and general feel of the left hand. I image the same is true for blind players of standard guitar.

Point being it takes sight, touch and hearing to become competent. Most steel players don’t make a lot of eye contact.