Estimated reading time 4 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Have you just bought a parlor guitar and thought it’d be cool to learn parlor guitar style? The guitar’s tuning impacts how it sounds and what styles will sound good on it. Read more to learn how to play and tune parlor guitar style.
Parlor guitars were popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- However, they have recently become trendy again.
- Today, we will look at a 19th century guitar method that gives us tips on how to play and tune the parlor guitar.
- In the post, How to Tune Like a Rock Star, we learned about how rock guitarists tune the guitar without using fret references.
- However, other ways of fine tuning the guitar have been used for at least the last 170 years.
This article uses technical terms. For definitions, see the Glossary at the end of the post.
Play and Tune Parlor Guitar: Tuning
Mobile users: for best results reading the music, tilt your screen 90o to the right.
Tuning with Harmonics Video
Guitar Without a Master: Tuning
The main source for How to Play and Tune Parlor Guitar Style is an old, anonymous guitar method book.
Published in 1851, Guitar Without a Master, gives this advice on tuning the strings, “The best way is to tune them openly, by ear, like those of a violin” (13).
- The music example that goes with this statement shows the guitar strings being tuned in standard tuning.
- The notes from lowest sounding string to highest sounding string goes: EADGBE.
- When violin players tune, they play two neighboring strings at the same time, tuning to an interval of a fifth. Beat-less fifths typify well-tuned violin strings.
Tune the guitar’s open strings to standard tuning, following the advice given above.
- If you find this too hard, you can use the above tab to tune using harmonics.
- Alternately, you could tune using a strobe tuner.
- The video under the tab shows you how to tune using harmonics.
- The video tunes strings 4 – 6 the same way as the tab. However, it tunes strings 1 – 2 differently.
- This will impact how the chords sound, so when tuning with harmonics, use the tab version where it differs from the video.
In theory, if we started our tuning with the open E string, it would look like this:
E1: 378 cents
B2: 1080 cents
G3: 694 cents
D4: 196 cents
A5: 898 cents
E6: 400 cents
One cent = 1/100th of semitone. In other words, each half-step (the span of one fret to the next) gets broken into 100 parts. Cents get used a lot to describe instrument tunings.
What I Got When I Followed the Tuning Instructions
First, the parameters:
- E6 is the lowest sounding string and E1 the highest.
- The theoretical tuning assumes pure perfect fourths between strings 6 and 5, 5 and 4, 4 and 3, and 2 and 1.
- Likewise, the major third between strings 3 and 2 gets tuned pure as well.
The next chart shows the actual cent values I got when I tuned the guitar using the method’s directions:
E1: 378 cents
B2: 1077 cents
G3: 691 cents
D4: 195 cents
A5: 899 cents
E6: 400 cents
As you can see, the actual tuning conforms fairly closely to the theoretical tuning, but not exactly.
- Even though the cent values vary, I had tuned the strings beat-less.
- Much of the variance between the actual and theoretical cent values can be explained by string inharmonicity.
Inharmonicity happens because the strings are stiff so that they don’t exactly conform to the harmonic series.
Not comfortable getting into standard tuning without using the frets? Try this free online guitar tuner for parlor guitar style standard guitar tuning!
In this section, I have described the tuning aspect of playing and tuning the parlor guitar. The next section talks about how the tuning impacts playing the parlor guitar style.
Play and Tune Parlor Guitar: Playing Style
Guitar Without a Master: Waltz
Mobile users: for best results reading the music, tilt your screen 90o to the right.
Guitar Without a Master: Discussion
The waltz above comes from page 17 in Guitar Without a Master.
In general, the method’s selection of keys helps to maximize the effect that the just tuned fourths have on the open chords.
- This effect makes most of the open chords’ major thirds slightly better in tune.
- However, the drastically lowered B string makes the G and A chords sound nicely in tune.
The arrangements of the pieces in the method book emphasize arpeggios.
- This helps to down play the out-of-tune intervals that the tuning creates and allows more flexible voice leading. Namely, the broken chords allow the guitar to shift between the various open chord shapes, such as: E, A, D, C, F, and G.
- By contrast, rock styles that use open G, open D, and open E tunings mostly emphasize parallel chord voicings.
- (Full disclosure time, I did add the roll notation to the E minor chords as I felt it made them work better. Otherwise, everything’s like the original.)
The well-tempered keyboard tunings of J.S. Bach’s time created key coloration.
- Likewise, this type of tuning on the guitar creates chord coloration.
- Some chords will be more in tune and others will be less in tune with all the shifts in tone color this implies.
The method’s repertoire has a fairly typical breakdown for its time: waltzes, polkas, marches, preludes, folk songs, and even opera themes. (Opera arias functioned as the pop songs of the 19th century.)
Intonation is not the only factor when playing and tuning the parlor guitar.
- The guitarist’s interpretation has a huge impact on the sound of the music as well.
- The following videos gives a lot of good advice on the nuances of 19th century guitar playing.
The How to Play 19th Century Guitar - Videos
Concluding Thoughts on Playing and Tuning the Parlor Guitar
By now you will have a fairly good idea of how the different aspects of playing and tuning the parlor guitar both shapes and sculpts the style. It is a style that give emphasis to expressive, emotive playing and subtlety of interpretation.
Have fun playing!
Related Articles
- How to Tune Like a Rock Star
- Play Like a Rock Star with Open G Tuning
- Sound Like a Rock Star with Open G Tuning
- How to Tune Classic Rock the Open G Sound Using Harmonics
- Learn How to Get a Killer Sound for Your Band
- How to Tune the Blues Rock Open D Sound Using Harmonics
- Jam Like a Rock Star with Open E Tuning
- Tune Your Ukulele Like a Hawaiian
- Intonation and Supplemented Equal Temperament
- How to Use an Extremely Accurate Guitar Strobe Tuner: to Make Your Guitar Sound Awesome
© 2021 Geoffrey Keith
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