I'll share a horror story I just survived. I've been working on a recording project, and the final track gave me fits. My partner had sent me what she'd recorded, to which I was to add my track. But instead of sound files in the recording program, she'd sent me an mp3 file, presumably mixed down from multi-tracking. And it was double-tracked - two inseparable takes, voice and guitar, with slight variations. And it included her playing slide guitar on both tracks. And she'd tuned down half a step (Why do guitarists do this? Drives me crazy.). And she'd done so by ear, apparently, as the guitar wasn't exactly a half-step flat. As you may have surmised, this presented me with a little slice of hell on earth. Oh, I forgot to mention - there was no point in this where she held a single steady note long enough for me to tune to it.
I was going back and forth trying to get it right. If I got one string right on the mark, tuning the other strings knocked it off. It seemed like it took forever, though it was probably just an hour or so, but a very frustrating, infuriating, exasperating hour.
I finally seized on the little oopsie just after the track, where removing her hand made her open E string ring for half a second. I used the program to copy that segment and repeated it, which gave me a note I could finally tune to.
But it did mean making at least a couple of passes tuning all strings to get them just so. I believe this could have been avoided if my Snark hadn't gone missing a while ago. I think there's an option to tune the tuner a little bit sharp or flat. If I could have dialed that in, it would have made the process so much simpler. The online tuner I've been using doesn't seem to have that capability, and my Boss TU-3 stage tuner is acting really weird. Well, anyway, I did meet this challenge and solve it, but I hope never to have to do that again. Not that I'll have any control over that!
Bookmarks