The Steel Guitar Forum

Hope everyone's doing well!

Since pedal steel is a fretless instrument (and playing in tune using a bar can be challenging), here's an article that has some tips for practicing intonation...
https://playpedalsteel.com/using-music-drones/

Anyone have some tips or techniques for practicing intonation, or playing in tune? Would love to hear various approaches to this!

Exercises where every other note is an open string. If they don't sound good together, there is a intonation problem. Or use a tuner and play notes with the bar at each fret to see where you get out of tune.

Thanks
Fraser

I find myself puzzled whenever this topic arises. Surely if you have a musical ear, which is to say a good practical sense of pitch, then intonation should be instinctive. If it isn't, then maybe the piano would be a better outlet for musical creativity.
I don't see how intonation can be learnt, although experience on this forum tells me that someone will put me straight...

Intonation can be learnt, Ian.

Also, you may have a good ear to begin with but if you slant the bar even slightly, it will throw you off. Checking against an open string is an easy way to see if you're off.

Thanks
Fraser

Intonation can definitely be learned and practised especially in the context of steel guitar. There are two parts to this, literally hearing how you are off and the physical act of adjusting the bar based on what you are hearing.

If intonation is simply hearing and no physical aspect, when I first started playing that good old regular guitar it was not immediate for me to learn how to hear higher or lower to get it in tune. It didn't take long, but it was definitely learned over a few days/weeks. More to the point though, if you make a test where you take octaves, 5ths, 3rds etc. and alter the tuning slightly 10c +- 5c +- or less, and spend some time over a few weeks you can get better at detecting smaller and smaller variances of "out of tune" with greater confidence. At least where I went to school practising this was a standard part of advanced ear training. To be completely honest here though, much better than just doing these rote exercises is to spend a good chunk of time playing a fretless instrument. I started on fretless bass, but that thing that we play with a chunk of metal is pretty great for it too.

I'd argue tho, great intonation is the combination of the ear and physical aspects of adjusting the bar in real time to be in tune as your ear detects small errors. The drones are a great way to practise that, but so is playing along to tracks, or jamming in bands. Basically any time you are playing with some kinda backing if you are listening you are practising it. So, I'm sure lots of/most people build the requisite muscle memory without doing anything more than just playing a lot of gigs

Casey, here's one exercise I recommend to my Skype students and I use myself. The goal is to train yourself to consistently and accurately adjust for visual parallax at all frets.

• mount a webcam (who doesn't have one of those these days?) giving an accurate top-down view of your neck
• have that video feed display in an app on your steel-adjacent laptop or computer, ideally right in front of your steel
• practice bar jumps with open chords (no pedals, levers) to a small range of frets, pulling the bar back enough to display the top end of frets
• at each new fret position, pause and check your 4th string tuning on an in-line electronic tuner, Check strings 4 and 8 to verify you're keeping the bar perfectly straight.
• then adjust your bar if it's not pitch-accurate; memorize what that accurate positioning looks like from your playing position and verified onscreen.

Note that only a few frets will appear to be directly under your tone bar to your webcam, so repositioning the cam to be centered on a higher or lower range of frets helps ensure visual accuracy in this exercise.

This can be done without the visual reference of the webcam on a monitor, but I think is very effective when combined with just visually studying what a perfectly intonated bar looks like to your eyes when playing.

Hope this helps some of you! And Casey, you have a wonderful website, it's a great resource and part of our "village." Dig those Prisma-enhanced images for sure!

I took a lesson from Bob Hofnar to get out of a rut, and he gave me a CD of drones- both single notes and chords. 15 years later I still use it regularly- for me its useful for both intonation training and harmonizing.

Intonation can...and must...be learned. Believe me, I've probably heard hundreds of beginner singers and pedal steelers, and exactly none of them had good intonation when they started. (Some never got it.)

I think the best way to practice it is to turn on some music, any music, and play along. And if you have to play between the frets, so much the better. Nothing helps more having to actually listen to the resultant combined sound of you along with other musicians and singers. I don't ascribe to drone-tones because that's not playing along with music (which no one can argue is the main idea, here). You need the real-world practice of playing actual music.

Record what you're doing, and listen to it the following day. That's the acid-test. When you can play along with any song and it sounds like your playing was part of the original recording, that's when you'll know you have succeeded.

I know intonation can be learned because I used to sound like a steaming heap of garbage and now I just kind of stink.

I still use my drone cd with students and anybody who wants it. I have a download I sell for $5. There tons of great ways to generate drones these days though. I use the Hayward Tuning Vine for all sorts of things and I just downloaded a new app called droneo. https://apps.apple.com/ao/app/droneo/id313811077

Intonation can absolutely be learned. It has more to do with how you listen and knowing what to listen for than any basic traits. I don’t know any professional steel players that aren’t obsessed with intonation. Playing in tune is a nightmare once you get to the point where you can hear what in tune is. There are so many variables and they often contradict each other.

I can see Ian Rae's point here. Surely, if one's ear is sound, if you produce a note that's a touch sharp or flat, then you'd hear it immediately?

I'd say that it's the technique of correct bar-movement and placement that will improve with practice. In that sense, intonation can be 'learned'.

In summary, and going by my earliest experiences, I knew when I'd hit something a bit 'pitchy', but that was when even just holding the bar was a new challenge.

If y'all want a hell of a time practicing intonation, try playing a gig with a guitarist who doesn't retune when they capo their guitar.

Roger Rettig wrote:I can see Ian Rae's point here. Surely, if one's ear is sound, if you produce a note that's a touch sharp or flat, then you'd hear it immediately?

My ear definitely was not as good before I began to play steel. The rigors of steeling improved my ability to find intervals and identify out of tune notes.

Hi,
As an exercise you can try playing "behind" the bar. Place your bar at the 12th fret. Pick a string on the right side of the bar, then pick it on the left side of the bar. It should ring out clearly on the left side. Repeat at the 7th & 5th frets.
The notes behind the bar are not always loud or musically useful but they are there. If the bar is placed at any fret you should get some note on the left side of the bar. Try placing the bar at the 13th fret and play strings 3 & 4 on the right side, then on the left side. (Of course when playing we usually dampen the strings behind the bar, only occasionally letting the left side ring.)
Regards,
Mike

Andrew:

When I started playing PSG, while I was captivated by its potential, I found I was immediately troubled by the 'pitchiness' with certain combinations and positions. Some was caused by my total lack of bar-control and some of it was poor pedal/knee-lever adjustment. These are factors that improve with time and effort. I always knew when it was wrong even if I didn't know how to correct things.

To this day, I'm plagued by the B pedal on my Emmons - it wanders. I get things spot-on at the changer-end, yet still it shifts a while later and pulls a tad sharp. The hex-tuner has become loose and sloppy, I guess. Forty-five years ago, I'd have assumed it was my playing causing it!

Lots of people here are aware of Paul Franklin’s Bar Control Exercise:
https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtop ... sc&start=0

Used with an E drone note, or any of the notes in the exercise for that matter, can certainly be viewed as an intonation workout as well as for bar control.

Interesting thread.
I'd think its a combination of ears and hands.
One has to have a sense of what they're going for, and the physical means to facilitate it.

For what its worth, in "This Is Your Brain On Music" Daniel Levitan describes how our ability to hear variance in pitch is related to the 'stepped' nature of the human ear. Like many thousands of sheets in a phone book that each represent a sort of neurological frequency recognition. As opposed to an analog 'sweep', which I would have thought would be the case, our faculty of pitch recognition is actually more like a staircase apparently, with a ton of tiny steps....
That relates to the hearing part I suppose, at a fundamental level of perception. As such I'd think it can be developed and refined, to an extent, especially if steady practice is happening concurrently to build and maintain manual control and agility on the strings.

Roger Rettig wrote:Andrew:

When I started playing PSG, while I was captivated by its potential, I found I was immediately troubled by the 'pitchiness' with certain combinations and positions.

Such a good point. The micro adjustments we make when tuning the changer become even more critical when playing in the second octave fret area, where those “certain combinations” can be almost useless due to intonation issues.

Jeremy Brandelik, Capo guitars can drive me to the funny farm. I cannot look at their guitar neck and fingers. My brain will not calculate the actual chord! Find the Song Chord, Shut my eyes and let my ears lead me.

From about 2003 to 05 I played in a band with a Key board, Seemed like every building a gig was in, I had to adjust my intonation off the fret so the Key Board and Steel was together. If the voltage is not consistant it will change a keyboard and some amps. a few cents.

Interesting to hear these approaches/thoughts, especially the physical component vs. the ear. Look forward to trying some of these recommendations out.

Think it's great how Donny mentioned being able to jump in and play on any song/music, and sound like you're a part of the original recording...genuine intonation!

Playing with drones consistently has been one of the most beneficial intonation practices for me, and it seems to translate well to playing with bands and recording sessions...seems to ingrain in both the ears and muscle memory (bar).

Hope everyone's doing well, thanks for the feedback!

Roger Rettig wrote:Andrew:

When I started playing PSG, while I was captivated by its potential, I found I was immediately troubled by the 'pitchiness' with certain combinations and positions. Some was caused by my total lack of bar-control and some of it was poor pedal/knee-lever adjustment. These are factors that improve with time and effort. I always knew when it was wrong even if I didn't know how to correct things.

To this day, I'm plagued by the B pedal on my Emmons - it wanders. I get things spot-on at the changer-end, yet still it shifts a while later and pulls a tad sharp. The hex-tuner has become loose and sloppy, I guess. Forty-five years ago, I'd have assumed it was my playing causing it!

Roger this really resonates with me. I've always felt my Bar Control to be lacking, in that I tend to over or undershoot where I want to end up. I also feel like I'm always hearing something "off" even in an open "perfectly tuned" configuration.

So yes, I think I'm acutely aware when I'm off, yet sadly not always able to do anything about it. And to me, being in tune is HUGE as far as Tone goes. I can't say I've heard an out of tune player have good tone as I can't get past the intonation issues, though this usually happens more with newer players rather than seasoned ones.

As far as intonation being something you can't learn, I'd say that depends on the person. I've heard lots of "New" players, who's intonation was HORRIBLE when starting out, yet down the road their intonation greatly improved, although some never improve. I've also heard "New" players who sounded great right from the get go. I liken some of the intonation issues to folks who sing with all their heart and soul, but can't carry a note in a bucket. Those poor people I don't think have any idea how out of tune they are singing. Are there Steel players like that? Sure. That said, intonation on a Steel is much easier to rectify than a person who can't sing in key. My brother is a great "Fretted Bass" player, but DON'T ask him to sing ... PLEASE!!!