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@ICBM "I've always said that boy would make a cracking country and western singer." John Peel, immediately after the 1997 Glastonbury set by Radiohead.
Apparently Barry White's natural voice is almost identical to Joe Pasquale's. Maybe.
I've found a lot of stuff is out of tune when I play along with it.
Of course, you have Pantera's funky tunings. I can't remember the exact tuning right now but when Dime tuned down to what we'd call flat, he called that E standard. When some of their songs sound as though they are down a whole step, Dime called this E flat IIRC. The actual cents of the tunings were quite strange. I wonder how he came up with this?
The guitars on the Racer X album Second Heat aren't exactly flat. From memory, I have to adjust the cents on Transcribe to something like +75 to get my guitar in tune with the album.
Suede also have some out of tune sounding guitars, not quite flat and not quite in standard. I'm not sure if this was done to suit Brett Anderson's voice or to just add to their trashy type sound.
If everything is tuned to A=442 then it’s not out of tune.
Out of tune is when the notes are out of tune relative to each other.
I know I’m being a bit pedantic but there’s a difference. I think guitarists tend to think A=440 is the only valid tuning when that’s not the case, as I posted earlier many orchestras tune to different references, this doesn’t make them out of tune, it’s just a different tuning standard
The way this can happen is if you tune only to the decay of a note, but then play with a heavy pick and heavy attack style on songs that are fast enough/have enough notes that the note never has time to settle back down to the decay pitch. This is how some recordings end up a bit sharp of the intended reference pitch, usually in heavier styles.
Guitar is actually a poor instrument for keeping to a reference pitch as the pitch of the notes is so tied to the dynamics, but some styles demand dynamics that will put the guitar out of tune (most specifically metal). While the sound of the guitar being picked hard can be very pleasing for heavy rock playing the tuning will often be sharp way before the guitar is being hit too hard to ruin the tone, if that makes any sense. If you listen to some dual guitar band live recordings with a keen ear you can sometimes pick out that one player hits a lot harder than the other and they'll end up slightly out with each other. Most of the time it isn't a problem and sounds fine, but it happens.
These days for recordings people either keep retuning and punching in on out of tune parts, or use an Evertune bridge (several rock/punk/heavy music albums have been recorded with these now, including the latest Blink 182). But historically there are loads of heavy guitar albums that are just a bit out either consistently or on certain notes (usually the low string which typically has the lowest tension and is hit the hardest) and sometimes that can be the player and not down to speeding up/slowing down of recordings. This is a reason many producers will track guitar first - then if when the bass goes down the guitar has ended up slightly sharp on some notes it's easy to retune a single note to where it sounds in with the guitars than it is to go re-do a load of guitars.
If a recording is in tune with itself the majority of people are happy. People who have perfect pitch maybe have a different experience but I'm not one of those people and I don't understand how that works with different tuning standards.
It is annoying if you just want to play along with another guitar track but I think there are apps to slightly re-pitch songs as necessary.
I do suspect that guitar bands (with no keyboards) in the days before tuners would have just tuned one with itself and then tuned everything else to that, or they all tuned to the same studio piano that was a bit out.
I was trying to play along to something on Youtube recently where it was about half a semitone out. From memory it was a reasonably recent recording so shouldn't just have been a video tape at slightly the wrong speed. I think there were Hammond organs or something along those lines involved. Do they ever drift off of concert pitch?
Metallica use a bell sample in 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' so I guess they had to tune the guitars to the sample. I think it would have been easier to slow the sample down to match the pitch of the guitars.
There's a Beatles song (can't remember which*) that IIRC is two different takes in slightly different keys and George Martin had to speed up one and slow down the other to fit them together.
* I googled it - Strawberry Fields Forever.
https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/strawberry-fields-forever/2/
Alot of the Definitely Maybe album sounds off pitch, and Don't Look Back In Anger is played at 455hz, was wondering why for years my guitar never sounded in tune with the recording!