I wonder if people are confusing "out of tune" with "autotune."
I was in a band 20 years ago and "out of tune" always meant what Rick says: one of the notes the instrument is generating is off relative to the other notes the instrument is generating. It had nothing to do with how close the notes are to the original piece. That was known as being "off key."[0]
[0]: I'm a drummer, so my understanding of "off key" might not be entirely accurate, but that's how I remember the phrase being used.
You can transpose any song to any key of course but there is a ground reality that is middle C is at 260 Hz. The whole band can be out-of-tune, but in tune between themselves.
This isn't universally true. Different tunings have been used in different time periods and locations. The modern standard pitch A440 (A4 at 440Hz) was only defined in 1926. Before that, the "standard" pitch has been as low as 415Hz (baroque pitch) or as high as 465Hz (Chorton pitch).
> For example, a 1740 tuning fork associated with Handel is pitched at A = 422.5 Hz, while a specimen from 1780 is pitched at A = 409 Hz, about a quarter-tone lower. A tuning fork that belonged to Ludwig van Beethoven around 1800, now in the British Library, is pitched at A = 455.4 Hz, well over a half-tone higher.
Besides the chosen pitch, only in an equal-temperament tuning can a piece of music be transposed to a different key and sound identical. Under different tunings, the ratio between subsequent notes is not always constant so transposing a piece of music to a different key will produce slightly different harmonic intervals.
When I was learning Green Day's "Longview" on bass I thought it was hilarious that if I wanted to play it album accurate I would have to play "out of tune." When they recorded the album they didn't have an electric tuner and just tuned to each other.
Yeah, if you play an A chord on the guitar and it sounds "off", then one or multiple strings are out of tune (sharp or flat relative to each other). The same is true if you have 2 guitars playing together and one guitar is out of tune to the other (or any number of instruments).
Beato seems to think that people should just "feel" or know that, but I think he might be blind to how little people play instruments or how little the average person has "trained" to pick up when something is out of tune. People that play instruments can usually pick it out pretty quickly, especially in a band setting. People that pick up a guitar can't just immediately tune it. Over time, however, you get a very intuitive sense for what "in tune" means (which is really just like a set amount of harmonic 'steps' between the strings) and can tune by ear very quickly - whether that in tune guitar has actually been tuned to E standard, however, is more about a common reference point for that note. Beato seems to be thinking that common reference point is a kind of general knowledge, but it's definitely not.
I thought that’s all it was, but as the video went on it seemed people thought he meant something different by the term, and they did perceive what he meant when he explained it.
That’s way more surprising to me than folks not being good at noticing it in the first place (they seemed to do that just fine!)
Or having ever taken a band class? Like even once? You have to tune the instruments to a common reference before you play so they’re not… out of tune. With themselves. The exact thing he’s talking about.
I’m so amazed such a musically-inclined guy (he’s clearly been passing it on to his kids, at least!) evidently had zero close family members who got what he meant, that I’m wondering if the story is exaggerated for effect and this was actually audience feedback. If not, I’m flabbergasted. That’s not obscure or deep knowledge.
Or maybe they were trolling him?
[edit] or is… language changing? I’ve never known “out of tune” to mean anything but what he was trying to communicate: you do not say a guitar is “out of tune” if it’s a half-step down or in an alternate tuning or something. Instruments accompanying a poorly-tuned piano are “out of tune” if they’re not exactly as wrong as the piano is. That’s just what it means. But maybe that’s changing?
[edit2] for context, I play some instruments to about the same level as people who only sing in the shower or in the car alone sing, am by far the most-musical person in my immediate family, and half-assed my way through some band classes in school—I’m entirely with him in being surprised this isn’t usage that anyone who’s looked at an instrument is familiar with.
Seems the conceptual disconnect is them thinking it means a note being "out of the tune" as in incorrect/wrong, as opposed to the physical instrument itself.
Yes, we know what you mean, even though people that are used to music from the Orient might not hear music from the Occident the same way as we Westeners do
Likewise, our own "western" sense of tuning has changed over the centuries.
I attended a baroque music performance, and the viola da gamba player had double frets on some notes. I asked him what's up with that, and he played some chords in different keys. It had to do with the instruments being tuned in non-equal temperament.
Lutes and other fretted instruments in western music back in the renaissance used tied on frets. Each fret was a piece of string tied in a loop around the neck.
This meant it was relatively easy to change the position of frets if you wanted to try different temperaments. They could also take small pieces of string and glue them on, so at some places on some strings have an extra option, so that say fretting at the tied on fret would give say Db but fretting on the little glued on fret next to that would give C#. That sounds like what that viola da gamba player might have had.
Here are a couple of videos where Brandon Acker (guitarist/lutist/etc) and Marshall Brune (luthier) played around with doing this on a modern Spanish style classical guitar. In the first video [1] they take a guitar Brune was building but had not yet had frets put on and tied gut frets on it.
In the second [2] Acker explores moving the frets to better tune the guitar for specific pieces, and then explores adding those extra small frets to some notes.
This is like me when I point out that someone has misused a word. I look over and chuckle something like: "they said utilized, but they meant used", or "they said nonplussed, when they meant unimpressed". The other person rightly looks at me like the mean-spirited pedant I am.
I don't know who this guy is, but he's clearly been immersed in music his entire life, and is playing a different game with different rules than everyone else is when it comes to listening to music. I respect his knowledge, I sympathize with his frustration, but I just don't care enough to make the same distinctions.
When you are pointing out someone has misused a word, that's superficial. The word is wrong, but every one understood the actual meaning. I would only do this if I think it may interest the people around and could lead to an interesting discussion, but would remain silent about this otherwise. Unless, of course, there's a real (risk of) misunderstanding (then, people are thankful you lifted the misunderstanding, instead of being annoyed). If you just say "what he actually meant" when everybody got what he actually meant (even you, since you were able to suggest the right word), that probably just feels pedantic indeed.
While he is pointing out the difference between being out of tune with itself, or with another instrument, and out of tune in general because he means different things, different actual concepts, and needs the other musicians to understand the difference when using these terms, because their meaning is indeed widely different. He is clarifying what he, himself, means when he says out of tune, trying to fix an actual misunderstanding.
tl;dr: in one situation, the actual intended meaning is likely going through correctly even if the words are incorrect. In the other, the meaning is lost because of imprecise understanding of the term. The first one is not really problematic. The second one is critically problematic.
Now, of course, he could probably have clarified this thing in a 5 times shorter video (this is no rocket science) without making a mountain out of a molehill, and him pointing out out of tune things to people who don't care would probably feel equally pedantic.
> Now, of course, he could probably have clarified this thing in a 5 times shorter video (this is no rocket science) without making a mountain out of a molehill, and him pointing out out of tune things to people who don't care would probably feel equally pedantic.
I think Youtube is a significant portion of his income these days, which means every decision he makes about content - how long - how inane - how petty - is driven by his experience with what ships the eyeballs.
Yes, of course. I assumed that he was acting like this with his relatives (which I hope he doesn't, unless it entertains them), but it's probable that it's just for us.
I don't think you need to be immersed in music to be able to tell if a guitar's string is out of tune. Just listen to someone play a major chord (you don't even need to know what a major chord is), and if it sounds vaguely wrong to you, then you know one of the strings is out of tune. That's all there is to it.
Your example about word misuse is probably the closest to what's going on here. Here we have someone who cares about some topic, sees other people who don't know something, hopes to educate them, and then finds out that they just don't care about the topic as much as he does. People use words all the time that don't mean what they think they mean, and they don't care. It doesn't make them feel good or bad when you correct them, it's just that using the right word has never occurred to them and doesn't really matter to them.
The latest word misuse that grinds my gears I've seen with my daughter and her friends is "on read". As in "He left my text message on read." Don't you mean "unread"?? "Whatever!" I'm thinking to myself: NOT WHATEVER. THOSE WORDS MEAN TOTALLY DIFFERENT THINGS!!! ARGH!
> The latest word misuse that grinds my gears I've seen with my daughter and her friends is "on read".
I believe they do mean "on read," not "unread". On read (to the best of my knowledge) means the recipient saw the message but didn't reply. This only applies to chat systems that send read receipts.
Language evolves, but slowly over generations. Not year to year. When someone is simply using a word incorrectly, they're using a word incorrectly. They're not evolving anything.
If I say, "Can you grab that book over their?" or mistake Aloud for Allowed, this is not language evolving--I'm just using the wrong word.
Every change has to start somewhere - and if it’s a change it will sound wrong to people at first. Mistakes could be the random mutations in this analogy.
One needs to understand why such word "misuses" angers them, and asks themselves whether it's really worth it to let something like this anger oneself. At the risk of committing a whataboutism, aren't there more fundamental things to be angry about? Wouldn't it be worth it to be able to be chill about these things and have a happier life?
That's generally the response. My thought is: then how do you know when someone is just wrong? Why do teachers have red pens? While in aggregate, I suppose today's mistakes are tomorrow's standard usage, but individual acts may simply mean somebody doesn't have the best way of saying what they're trying to communicate.
To confirm the other chap and add a little more detail, such messages can be in one of three important states: unread, read, and replied to. The phones report this. If it's unread, you don't know whether they've seen it or not; if it's read, you know they have, but they haven't yet chosen to reply. Pointedly, perhaps. Rather significant difference, choice of word very intentional. Unfortunately this is genuinely a case of dad being out of touch, not a stylistic disagreement :)
No, they don't mean that. They mean "read", the phrase "on read" means the recipient read the message but did not reply. It's offensive to some folks to be left on read.
Yeah, I think it's probably just a vocabulary issue, but it could be something else.
When I play an instrument that's perfectly in tune, it feels really good... maybe because in-tune instruments generate harmonics with themselves creating a fuller, more pleasing experience. Kinda like drinking a really nice wine.
Maybe people who don't play haven't ever noticed that instruments do that.
Nick Beato (bee'-ah-tow) is great. He has some awesome interviews with old-school rockers. Really fun. And he certainly has an engaging way of teaching music theory.
I'm no pro musician, as he is, though I do dabble. I can detect the out-of-tune chords, but he can tell which string is out of tune on the guitar. To me, that's just amazing.
But, here, I'm not sure what he's saying in this video. On the one hand, everyone he talks to about his son's "A" string being out of tune is saying: How would I know, I've never heard the song before.
Then, he ends with all of us being inundated with precisely tuned (and precisely timed) music these days. Given that, I would guess people are more sensitive to slight out-of-tune with itself instruments?
I'm not a musician and I'm a Rick Beato fan as well. I especially like his "What Makes This Song Great?" series of videos breaking down how well-known songs are put together.
I think he explains what he's saying in the video, but it takes about 3/4 of the video to get there. When he de-tunes his C-string and plays the chord, it very obviously sounds dissonant. Even to my untrained ear, it sounds bad. When people say, "I've never heard this song before?" what they really mean is that they don't know if the bad sound they are hearing is intentional or not. If you watch a lot of Rick's other videos, you know he has not only a trained ear but also an understanding of chord sequences. Even if he hadn't heard the song before, he would know that a chord sounded bad based on what notes were played before it.
To your last point, Rick's thought is that people /should/ be more sensitive to out-of-tune-with-themselves instruments given how perfectly tuned most commercial music is these days, and that's why he's surprised that people don't hear it (or think that it might be intentional).
> what they really mean is that they don't know if the bad sound they are hearing is intentional or not.
His whole point was his son's guitar was out of tune with itself, just like the example he showed with his C-string. Meaning every chord his son played that used the A string, sounded "just bad" in the same way. There aren't published songs where one string in a guitar is out of tune in that way, or where the piano is out of tune with the bass.
I think the giveaway was when he isolated the chord and played it for people everyone noticed, but when it's just part of a song, the non-musicians don't notice. Not everyone listens to music the same way, and it seems Mr. Beato listens for and appreciates things like key, meter, chord progressions, and so on, and it instantly sticks out when something is wrong. But maybe his "layman" family just vibe along and the only thoughts in their head are "well music is playing and I like/recognize this song." That's as deep as most people appreciate music.
>>> But, here, I'm not sure what he's saying in this video.
To paraphrase his point with editorial license: Laypeople don't seem to have an innate sense of "in tune," which is surprising to him because as a musician he just takes it for granted.
I'm a seasoned jazz musician with a classical background, and watching Beato's videos has given me a new and deeper appreciation of the creative process of making popular music.
I’m a musician, not anywhere as good as Beato, and I can hear out on tune instruments quickly. I saw the Smashing Pumpkins back in 94 and could instantly hear that they were out of tune. After the first song one of them switched out their instrument and it was fixed.
I appreciate the point he made, and would have appreciated if he'd had made it maybe two fewer times. I think the point he's missing is that people don't really care, and if it sounds fine, then that's good enough. I come from a musical family, and when I'm listening critically, this kind of stuff can tweak my knobs same as his, but that's not often enough to be a problem. Usually I'm just enjoying music, and unless something is egregiously out of tune, then good enough is probably fine.
I think he also misses the point of context of the note. An out of tune string sounds bad in isolation, of course, but without knowing the piece, maybe it wasn't played very long, or happened to work in a passing tone to the next chord, or maybe was drowned out by the mix. There are lots of reasons that people without perfect pitch would miss a bad note.
Okay, we get the humblebrag, you have a great relative or even absolute pitch. I am not going around telling everyone that Monty Hall’s problem or Simpson’s paradox is glaringly obvious once you think about it. I am not getting confused like other people by two co-centered probability density graphs of the normal distribution, one with larger standard deviation than the other - it is obvious to me (but somehow not most other people) that they have the same average.
The point being is that if you don’t train yourself to recognize certain patterns, you will not recognize them.
This isn't relative pitch thing. An untrained ear generally can hear when one note is off by 5+ cents or so when playing a chord... when they're asked.
And if you're a musician, you will pick up on it very quickly in real time, in general.
The key is most people will automatically filter it out until actually being asked unless it's egregiously bad.
I would argue part of the issue comes down to guitar itself - 1) it's not a well tempered instrument. It's always kinda out of tune a bit 2) it can often go out of tune within the course of a song in live performances and 3) add some distortion on top, it kinda blurs things.
So my take is people are just preconditioned to listen more to what is being played - in the context of a song - rather than whether it sounds a bit off or not. In short it's an attention thing, not an ability thing.
What is being discussed here is the 12 note equal temperament which has only been a standard since the 18th century in western countries. To say something is in or out of tune is in reference to that scale which we now consider to be fundamental to all music. It isn't.
Oddly enough most laypeople don't know about equal temperament, and most musicians learn in their training that it's not fundamental. In my earliest music lessons, I learned to tune my instrument, the cello, by perfect intervals. My teacher explained to me why the notes wouldn't match the piano exactly. Save for keyboards, most of the instruments in an orchestra don't have a well defined temperament.
Isn't he contradicting himself when he says people are used to hear in-tune instruments because they are auto-tuned by a device, so that they immediately hear when an instrument is out of tune? It contradicts everything he said up to that point, which is most of the video.
I get annoyed a lot by out-of-tune instruments, to the point that I immediately stop listening to the song (usually live performances).
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadI was in a band 20 years ago and "out of tune" always meant what Rick says: one of the notes the instrument is generating is off relative to the other notes the instrument is generating. It had nothing to do with how close the notes are to the original piece. That was known as being "off key."[0]
[0]: I'm a drummer, so my understanding of "off key" might not be entirely accurate, but that's how I remember the phrase being used.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch :
> For example, a 1740 tuning fork associated with Handel is pitched at A = 422.5 Hz, while a specimen from 1780 is pitched at A = 409 Hz, about a quarter-tone lower. A tuning fork that belonged to Ludwig van Beethoven around 1800, now in the British Library, is pitched at A = 455.4 Hz, well over a half-tone higher.
Besides the chosen pitch, only in an equal-temperament tuning can a piece of music be transposed to a different key and sound identical. Under different tunings, the ratio between subsequent notes is not always constant so transposing a piece of music to a different key will produce slightly different harmonic intervals.
Why John Frusciante is Out Of Tune (Scar Tissue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Daw93bRHe4Y
Beato seems to think that people should just "feel" or know that, but I think he might be blind to how little people play instruments or how little the average person has "trained" to pick up when something is out of tune. People that play instruments can usually pick it out pretty quickly, especially in a band setting. People that pick up a guitar can't just immediately tune it. Over time, however, you get a very intuitive sense for what "in tune" means (which is really just like a set amount of harmonic 'steps' between the strings) and can tune by ear very quickly - whether that in tune guitar has actually been tuned to E standard, however, is more about a common reference point for that note. Beato seems to be thinking that common reference point is a kind of general knowledge, but it's definitely not.
That’s way more surprising to me than folks not being good at noticing it in the first place (they seemed to do that just fine!)
No, but they can recognize when a guitar sounds "good" vs when it sounds "bad." He mentions that in the video.
Humans have a certain amount of innate musical recognition that doesn't require education to understand.
This video demonstrates this with the pentatonic scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjvR9UMQCrg
I’m so amazed such a musically-inclined guy (he’s clearly been passing it on to his kids, at least!) evidently had zero close family members who got what he meant, that I’m wondering if the story is exaggerated for effect and this was actually audience feedback. If not, I’m flabbergasted. That’s not obscure or deep knowledge.
Or maybe they were trolling him?
[edit] or is… language changing? I’ve never known “out of tune” to mean anything but what he was trying to communicate: you do not say a guitar is “out of tune” if it’s a half-step down or in an alternate tuning or something. Instruments accompanying a poorly-tuned piano are “out of tune” if they’re not exactly as wrong as the piano is. That’s just what it means. But maybe that’s changing?
[edit2] for context, I play some instruments to about the same level as people who only sing in the shower or in the car alone sing, am by far the most-musical person in my immediate family, and half-assed my way through some band classes in school—I’m entirely with him in being surprised this isn’t usage that anyone who’s looked at an instrument is familiar with.
I attended a baroque music performance, and the viola da gamba player had double frets on some notes. I asked him what's up with that, and he played some chords in different keys. It had to do with the instruments being tuned in non-equal temperament.
This meant it was relatively easy to change the position of frets if you wanted to try different temperaments. They could also take small pieces of string and glue them on, so at some places on some strings have an extra option, so that say fretting at the tied on fret would give say Db but fretting on the little glued on fret next to that would give C#. That sounds like what that viola da gamba player might have had.
Here are a couple of videos where Brandon Acker (guitarist/lutist/etc) and Marshall Brune (luthier) played around with doing this on a modern Spanish style classical guitar. In the first video [1] they take a guitar Brune was building but had not yet had frets put on and tied gut frets on it.
In the second [2] Acker explores moving the frets to better tune the guitar for specific pieces, and then explores adding those extra small frets to some notes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--y_vf-Kg-w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiKCORN-6m8
I don't know who this guy is, but he's clearly been immersed in music his entire life, and is playing a different game with different rules than everyone else is when it comes to listening to music. I respect his knowledge, I sympathize with his frustration, but I just don't care enough to make the same distinctions.
When you are pointing out someone has misused a word, that's superficial. The word is wrong, but every one understood the actual meaning. I would only do this if I think it may interest the people around and could lead to an interesting discussion, but would remain silent about this otherwise. Unless, of course, there's a real (risk of) misunderstanding (then, people are thankful you lifted the misunderstanding, instead of being annoyed). If you just say "what he actually meant" when everybody got what he actually meant (even you, since you were able to suggest the right word), that probably just feels pedantic indeed.
While he is pointing out the difference between being out of tune with itself, or with another instrument, and out of tune in general because he means different things, different actual concepts, and needs the other musicians to understand the difference when using these terms, because their meaning is indeed widely different. He is clarifying what he, himself, means when he says out of tune, trying to fix an actual misunderstanding.
tl;dr: in one situation, the actual intended meaning is likely going through correctly even if the words are incorrect. In the other, the meaning is lost because of imprecise understanding of the term. The first one is not really problematic. The second one is critically problematic.
Now, of course, he could probably have clarified this thing in a 5 times shorter video (this is no rocket science) without making a mountain out of a molehill, and him pointing out out of tune things to people who don't care would probably feel equally pedantic.
I think Youtube is a significant portion of his income these days, which means every decision he makes about content - how long - how inane - how petty - is driven by his experience with what ships the eyeballs.
Your example about word misuse is probably the closest to what's going on here. Here we have someone who cares about some topic, sees other people who don't know something, hopes to educate them, and then finds out that they just don't care about the topic as much as he does. People use words all the time that don't mean what they think they mean, and they don't care. It doesn't make them feel good or bad when you correct them, it's just that using the right word has never occurred to them and doesn't really matter to them.
The latest word misuse that grinds my gears I've seen with my daughter and her friends is "on read". As in "He left my text message on read." Don't you mean "unread"?? "Whatever!" I'm thinking to myself: NOT WHATEVER. THOSE WORDS MEAN TOTALLY DIFFERENT THINGS!!! ARGH!
I believe they do mean "on read," not "unread". On read (to the best of my knowledge) means the recipient saw the message but didn't reply. This only applies to chat systems that send read receipts.
If I say, "Can you grab that book over their?" or mistake Aloud for Allowed, this is not language evolving--I'm just using the wrong word.
One needs to understand why such word "misuses" angers them, and asks themselves whether it's really worth it to let something like this anger oneself. At the risk of committing a whataboutism, aren't there more fundamental things to be angry about? Wouldn't it be worth it to be able to be chill about these things and have a happier life?
No, they don't mean that. They mean "read", the phrase "on read" means the recipient read the message but did not reply. It's offensive to some folks to be left on read.
When I play an instrument that's perfectly in tune, it feels really good... maybe because in-tune instruments generate harmonics with themselves creating a fuller, more pleasing experience. Kinda like drinking a really nice wine.
Maybe people who don't play haven't ever noticed that instruments do that.
I'm no pro musician, as he is, though I do dabble. I can detect the out-of-tune chords, but he can tell which string is out of tune on the guitar. To me, that's just amazing.
But, here, I'm not sure what he's saying in this video. On the one hand, everyone he talks to about his son's "A" string being out of tune is saying: How would I know, I've never heard the song before. Then, he ends with all of us being inundated with precisely tuned (and precisely timed) music these days. Given that, I would guess people are more sensitive to slight out-of-tune with itself instruments?
I think he explains what he's saying in the video, but it takes about 3/4 of the video to get there. When he de-tunes his C-string and plays the chord, it very obviously sounds dissonant. Even to my untrained ear, it sounds bad. When people say, "I've never heard this song before?" what they really mean is that they don't know if the bad sound they are hearing is intentional or not. If you watch a lot of Rick's other videos, you know he has not only a trained ear but also an understanding of chord sequences. Even if he hadn't heard the song before, he would know that a chord sounded bad based on what notes were played before it.
To your last point, Rick's thought is that people /should/ be more sensitive to out-of-tune-with-themselves instruments given how perfectly tuned most commercial music is these days, and that's why he's surprised that people don't hear it (or think that it might be intentional).
His whole point was his son's guitar was out of tune with itself, just like the example he showed with his C-string. Meaning every chord his son played that used the A string, sounded "just bad" in the same way. There aren't published songs where one string in a guitar is out of tune in that way, or where the piano is out of tune with the bass.
To paraphrase his point with editorial license: Laypeople don't seem to have an innate sense of "in tune," which is surprising to him because as a musician he just takes it for granted.
I'm a seasoned jazz musician with a classical background, and watching Beato's videos has given me a new and deeper appreciation of the creative process of making popular music.
I think he also misses the point of context of the note. An out of tune string sounds bad in isolation, of course, but without knowing the piece, maybe it wasn't played very long, or happened to work in a passing tone to the next chord, or maybe was drowned out by the mix. There are lots of reasons that people without perfect pitch would miss a bad note.
The point being is that if you don’t train yourself to recognize certain patterns, you will not recognize them.
And if you're a musician, you will pick up on it very quickly in real time, in general.
The key is most people will automatically filter it out until actually being asked unless it's egregiously bad.
I would argue part of the issue comes down to guitar itself - 1) it's not a well tempered instrument. It's always kinda out of tune a bit 2) it can often go out of tune within the course of a song in live performances and 3) add some distortion on top, it kinda blurs things.
So my take is people are just preconditioned to listen more to what is being played - in the context of a song - rather than whether it sounds a bit off or not. In short it's an attention thing, not an ability thing.
I get annoyed a lot by out-of-tune instruments, to the point that I immediately stop listening to the song (usually live performances).