What to do when you have to tune a lot during shows?

[Blackened Soul]

After having had played a ten year stint of playing with acoustic blues guitarist on outdoor gigs in a bunch of tunings..
Fuck clip on tuners. Guitarist. Please stop buying them. They make you suck. In your soul. They make you a horrible person.

[dubkitty]

the first two tunings are close enough that it's not as problematic since you only have to retune 2 strings. i would use a 2d guitar for the C tuning, though...the drop in string tension will fuck up your ability to retune accurately, and those low C and G strings would probably be happier with one bump heavier than the strings for the D tunings. if you use .010s for the D stuff, use .011s for C tuning and so forth.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Bandmates, banter. Ultimately it's better to have silence than pointless noodling/bad sounds.

Well there is the option of having nice sounds instead of bad sounds, which I wanna explore.

Yeah of course! I just meant that I have seen bands where people fiddle or someone plays something stupid while someone tunes. Good sounds are good!! But anything is better than bad sounds including silence.

[dubkitty]

when i saw Spirits of the Beehive open for Ride they did the loops-between-songs thing. i thought it worked well, but for some reason it puts me off. but then, i come from the era before electronic tuners, when a band would hack around for 5 minutes trying to tune to a note from the Hammond organ which was the only thing onstage with (relatively) constant pitch. nowadays audiences seem to expect the next song to start within 5 seconds like it does on their Spotify.

[chromandre]

when i saw Spirits of the Beehive open for Ride they did the loops-between-songs thing. i

damn I regret missing that one!

[dubkitty]

it was wonderful. the audience was lame (this was in Asheville, NC), but the music was superb. i should have gone to Carrboro the night before, which also would have been 100 miles less of a drive. had i been funded i'd have done the whole DC->Carrboro->Asheville swing.

[Dandolin]

ah, the good old days, when men were men and vibratos, whammy bars and string bending were invented to cover up out of tune guitars
I actually enjoy between songs loops, feedback, found sounds, but then again, I just spent an hour listening to bird song samples to figure out which is the bugger that goes too wut weet, too wut weet waurrgh outside my window from 5:50 to 7:20 am every morning, and enjoyed every second...later on I'm going to do some critical listening to the sound of unit doors being opened and closed at my local storage facility.

[dubkitty]

i love feedback like some people like ice cream. well, that's not quite accurate, because who doesn't love ice cream?

[sears]

Rhythm section funk breakdowns. The problem I had with clip-ons is that if another guitar or bass is playing, the tuner doesn't pick your note up as well.

[Dandolin]

yep - on point - whatever noise yer makin' to cover up the existential canyon of silence while you tune, if you want accurate tunin', ya gotta plug in....

[Pepsihillo]

I know this probably isn't the kind of advice the OP was hoping for, but the Line6 Variax guitars would be my choice if I had to change a lot of tunings during shows. They play pretty good and you can change the tuning with a flick of a switch. They don't even look half-bad these days.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Silence generally works fairly well, but sometimes people start talking, and I think that's annoying. Not as a musician really, but whenever I'm in the audience, seeing a band like God's Pee or MONO, it always irritates me a tiny bit when people start chatting.

Oh I missed this one before lol. Kind of annoys me too and I love gigs where people keep quiet in the quiet bits. I have noticed it requires being a particular type of band with a particular type of audience. Really, really beautiful quiet music in a small room will do it. And really famous but quite quiet/atmospheric music in a larger room. Sadly is hard to plan for this so I see why you want noise.

[dubkitty]

i think that's the biggest argument in favor of sonic filler...today's audience expects continual diversion, and in a 30-second gap the collective mind starts wandering especially if you're an unfamiliar opening act..

[coldbrightsunlight]

Yeah. It's a shame because one of my favourite things in the world is that time at a truly special gig when everyone stays really quiet for the quiet bit because everyone gets it. Magical but rare.

[dubkitty]

back in the Cambrian era people not only used to listen deep, they would actually applaud after the first verse of a new/unheard song by singer-songwriters. this happened repeatedly on 4 Way Street, and also at Neil Young and Jackson Browne shows i attended in the early 70s. but we aren't art any more, we're mere entertainment. yet another of the many things about involvement with music which broke my heart.