Keith Tuners For Guitar
Christina Smith
As I said, the banjo tuners simply have end stops, so if you mark your existing machine heads and then tune them up to the mark, that will give you an idea of how accurately the D tuners will come back.
D-tuners will handle the tension of a guitar string.
There is a qualitative difference between the Kieth-Bump tuners and Schallers. Schaller tuners are considered inferior to the Keith tuners in accuracy and function by virtually all of those who use them on the banjohangout. I have had both and agree with the assessment. You get what you pay for (I have had my Keith tuners since 1964 and they still work great.)
The Keith tuners are very accurate, the same could not be said about other tuners. There are several drawbacks to using them on guitars: 1) they look funny, 2) they add mass to the headstock and may change the sound of your guitar, 3) they are not a accurate for tuning since they have a 4:1 ratio opposed to the usual 12:1 (or better) of guitar tuners.
Mike Keyes
I will have to see if the Keith tuners will drop three whole tones. They are limited by the range of one turn (actually slightly less) so I doubt that they will be able to go that far but they are able to go 1 and a half tones with ease.
Mike Keyes
your profile join preferences help search next newest topic next oldest topicAuthorTopic: Detuners?Bobby Bowman
Member From: Cypress, Texas, USAposted 14 April 2003 03:53 PM profile You'd think that after more than 50 years in the business I'd know what to call 'em.
Maybe a "Scruggs Tuner", maybe a "B Bender", I'm not sure. Anyway, the guitar player in our band wants to be able to lower his 6'th string on his Tele down to D and then back up to E and be able to tune it. He is actually a very accomplished guitar player, but neither of us know who to contact about such a thing.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
BB------------------
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Joey Ace
Sysop From: Southern Ontario, Canadaposted 14 April 2003 04:13 PM profile "Scruggs Tuners" or "Keith Tuners" are common terms.
Do a search at www.google.com and you'll find a lot of sources.One is A set has two types, one peg designed to lower a whole tone, the other a half tone. If you can buy just one, you want the whole tone for "Dropped D" tuning.
[This message was edited by Joey Ace on 14 April 2003 at 04:15 PM.]
This tuning has a very classic rock feel, and the most popular artist to use it is probably the Rolling Stones (I love this earlier lesson Marty Music did on this!). With open G, strumming down the open strings, you can play a G chord. It has a distinctly bluesy sound, and you can hear it in music from artists like the Black Crowes, Robert Johnson, and Joni Mitchell to name a few.
One of the simplest alternate tunings is Drop D, which takes the low E string down a whole step to D. This is one of the most popular alternate tunings because lowering the pitch of the lowest string creates a bluesy, rock, or grunge sound with only one string retune. Some artists who use this tuning include Nirvana, Metallica, Foo Fighters, Led Zeppelin, and country artists like Miranda Lambert, Jason Isbell, and Jake Owen.
A clip on tuner is a great place to start, which you can find in the Orangewood Accessory Kit. Some guitars even come with built-in tuners, like the Orangewood Melrose Live Collection. In a pinch, you might need to resort to a tuning app on your phone.
A jam with your friends may not be the best time to decide to tune your guitar to open C tuning (unless telling awkward jokes to fill the silence is your thing). Some alternate tunings may just require one string to be retuned, while other tunings need every string to change.
Haley is a guitar player, blogger, and guitar teacher based out of Nashville, TN. When she's not playing or writing, you can find her in line at her favorite breakfast taco shop, taking her dog hiking at the nearest waterfall, or binging Outer Banks with her hubby.
A very clear example of this occurs in Alfred Schnittke's Stille Nacht (1978) for violin and piano. At the end of the piece, the violin detunes and retunes the open G string down to D and back to G again, creating an eerie glissando. Note also the very end of the piece, in which the tuning peg is used to create a vibrato/trill effect. The below recording is timed to the peg scordatura.
For a particularly extreme example, Michael Manring the experimental bass guitarist enjoyed the expressive possibilities of retuning mid performance so much that he had an instrument purpose built to allow him to retune quickly on the fly.
Arguably at this point that barely even counts as "retuning", it's just become another expressive capacity of the instrument. Still, I thought it would be relevant to the discussion for an example of pushing this idea of dynamic retuning to the limit.
Some banjos are fitted with cam tuners (known as D tuners, Scruggs tuners or Keith tuners) which facilitate fast, accurate retuning between two fixed notes, and which are also used to good effect during playing.
Their inspiration for going into the banjo business was Earl Scruggs' creation of homemade cam tuners, which he developed after recording "Earl's Breakdown" in 1951. Scruggs had sought to refine the way he played this tune by finding a way to re-tune more accurately during the piece. Keith was inspired by the four banjo tunes ("Earl's Breakdown", "Foggy Mountain Chimes", "Flint Hill Special", and "Randy Lynn Rag") on the 1957 Flatt and Scruggs album Foggy Mountain Jamboree, which all used Scruggs's cam tuning machines
Perhaps a banjo player can weigh in on this. I'm no expert (I'm a guitarist) but I note that the sound is similar to slide guitar, and both instruments are fretted, picked and played in American (country, bluegrass) folk music.
Unless I am mistaken, no one has mentioned the Schumann Piano Quartet where the cellist is asked to tune the C string down to a Bb at the end of the slow movement, in order to hold a long pedal point.
There's a song in the musical Batboy that does this. I'm forgetting a lot of the details (esp. the name of the song), but I think it was done to shift the range of the vocal melody and/or as a phrase modulation for musical interest. It just coincidentally inconvenienced the guitar player. Most of the song could be played in standard tuning except for the middle section that needed a low Eb from the guitar.
Somewhere there's Haydn symphony where the violins are asked to retune the G string to (I think) F and then play the open string while tuning it back up to G. But I can't remember which one and I don't have the scores or time to search IMSLP.
Walton in 'Facade' asks the cello to retune the C string to B, and then notates it as a transposing instrument. I once heard a performance where the player didn't realise that and played all the C string notes a semitone sharp - not a success. That's not exactly during a piece as it's for one of the movements only so it's more like scordatura.
I'm not aware of classical music pieces that require some occasional retuning, but if they exist I suspect they are written specifically for a particular virtuoso performer who can pull it off reliably every time.
And while this isn't strictly an answer to your question, but to give an idea of what some people can do, I once saw Vishwa Mohan Bhatt change a broken string in the middle of a long improvisation and then tune it up as needed, and throughout this process not a single bad note was heard... in fact, if I had not been watching him, just by listening I could have thought that the improvisation just changed to a slow mood for a minute before going back to normal.
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