Guitar Intonation
An obvious question? Yes! Worth talking about? Absolutely!
Intonation
is the accuracy in which an electric guitar or bass can produce a
fretted note and the most important issue with any instrument. Setting
the intonation on a guitar is the act of adjusting the length of the
strings (by moving the bridge saddles) to compensate for the thickness
of the string and the stretching of a string due to pushing it down to
the fret board to produce a note. For our purposes here I will focus
only on electric instruments for now.
To
adjust the intonation of your guitar or bass guitar, you move the
bridge saddles toward or away from the fret board until the 12th fret
note and its harmonic are equal in pitch to the same open-string note,
which are exactly one octave apart. Accurate intonation is critical to
pitch quality. Pitch quality is essential to "in tune" playing.
Poor pitch quality = "out of tune" notes which in turn = poor musical presentation. Wouldn't you want to present your musical talents in the best way possible? Of course, you do.
Now,
it is not necessary for a guitar player to know this at all. It is
essential however that the guitar possess this quality and maintain as
close to perfect intonation as possible. Buying on looks alone can be
very disappointing. If however, you like an instrument for the looks
but realize that you will need to have it worked on to get it playable
then that is fine. It's best to speak to a Luthier or guitar builder
previous to any purchase. It's like to asking a mechanic which car he
would recommend before you walk into the show room to select one. You
can benefit from his first hand knowledge and experience and not have to
go it alone. After all the mechanic knows which cars breakdown.
