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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.

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.

VREEEEVROOOOOW wrote:

coldbrightsunlight wrote: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.

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.

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

damn I regret missing that one!

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.

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.

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

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.

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....

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.

VREEEEVROOOOOW wrote: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.

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..

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.

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.