Guide · hearing cents
Can you hear 5 cents?
On its own a few cents slip past almost everyone, but against your own guitar they turn into a wobble you can learn to hear.
The short answer
Alone, rarely. Against a guitar, yes.
Played on its own, a record 5 ¢ sharp is, for practical purposes, the same as one at A 440. Most people would not notice 20 ¢ either: every note moves by the same amount, so the song still sounds right.
Play along, though, and things change. Your strings give the ear a reference, and two notes a few cents apart make a slow wobble. At 5 ¢ that wobble is faint and lazy. At 15 or 20 ¢ chords turn sour. Near 50 ¢ the record sits midway between two notes.
So the useful question is not whether you can hear it, but whether it will bother you while you play. The sections below answer that, with sounds to try.
One note, then another
Telling two notes apart
Listening tests play a tone, then a second one slightly higher, and ask which was higher. Results vary from person to person and with the sound, so read these as typical findings, not hard limits:
- Trained musicians, in a quiet room with clean tones in the middle of the range, often catch about 5 ¢, and the best of them a little less.
- Most other listeners need something like 10 to 25 ¢ before they are sure.
- Everyone does worse with very low notes, short notes, vibrato, distortion or a pause between the two sounds. Practice helps a lot.
Try it: each button starts on A 440 and steps up by the amount it names. If the 5 ¢ step sounds like one note played twice, that is normal.
Two notes at once
Beats: the wobble a tuner removes
Sound two close notes together and the ear has an easier job. The sound swells and fades in a steady pulse, and the number of pulses per second is simply the difference between the two frequencies: 440 Hz against 441 Hz gives one beat a second.
Cents are a ratio, so the same 5 ¢ is a different number of hertz at each pitch:
- A 440, the 5th fret of the high E string: 5 ¢ up is 441.27 Hz, about 1.3 beats a second. At 10 ¢ up, 442.55 Hz, it beats about 2.5 times a second.
- Low E, 82.41 Hz: 5 ¢ up is 82.65 Hz, only 0.24 Hz apart, so one slow swell about every four seconds. Easy to miss.
That is why small offsets show up first on the high strings and in long chords. A real low string helps a little, because its overtones beat too, and faster: the overtone two octaves up beats four times as fast as the note itself.
Use headphones for the low E pair, and listen for a single slow swell.
Listeners and players
Who hears it, and who does not
- Listeners. With nothing to compare against, a whole record 20 ¢ off passes almost everyone by. The steps between its notes are untouched, and those steps are what the ear follows. Queen's A Day at the Races sits about 21 ¢ flat and sounds perfectly normal on its own.
- People with absolute pitch. They can name a note with no reference at all, so a record sitting between two keys may feel wrong to them. The skill is rare, far less common than one person in a hundred, and more common in people who started music very young.
- Players. A guitar tuned to A 440 is a reference, and a player who plays along usually hears a clash quickly. Held chords, open strings, slide and bends give it away first, because the notes sit still long enough to beat. Fast, palm-muted riffs hide it best.
- Singers. They follow the band by ear and adjust without thinking, so a singer rarely notices an offset. That is also how a band that tuned only to itself can sound perfectly in tune on a record far from A 440.
Playing along
What each offset means with a guitar in your hands
| Record off by | What you hear against it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| up to 5 ¢ | Nothing, even on long chords. | Tune to A 440 and play. |
| 5 to 15 ¢ | Fine on fast riffs. Held chords, clean arpeggios and lines played in unison with the record get a slow wobble; slide players notice first. | Match the record for slow songs, slide, or when you record along. |
| 15 to 35 ¢ | Plainly sour: chords beat fast, single notes sound off, bends land in the wrong place. | Retune to the record. |
| 35 to 50 ¢ | Close to the middle between two notes. An A 440 tuner may name the note above or the one below, and tabs of one song can disagree by a half step. | Retune to the record. If the tab's shapes then sound a half step off, try the other semitone. |
The Tune button beside every song on TuneLit's album pages does the retuning: it opens the guitar tuner in the song's tuning with the measured offset already set, cents included. You tune each string to the record, not to A 440. When a record sits far from the note the tabs name, the button gives a reference A instead, such as E Standard at A 424.
Measured
Real records, from a hair to half a step
- About 5 ¢. Metallica's 72 Seasons measures about 5 ¢ sharp on CD, and the Black Album about the same on CD and LP. A guitar at A 440 sounds in tune with both.
- About 10 to 15 ¢. Nirvana's Nevermind sits about 14 ¢ sharp and Bleach about 11 ¢ flat. Loud, fuzzy chords cover much of it; a clean chord held against the record shows it.
- About 20 to 25 ¢. Deep Purple's Burn runs about 21 ¢ sharp on every song. Black Sabbath's Paranoid is about 25 ¢ sharp, and their first album, from the same year, about 25 ¢ flat. At A 440 you sound wrong against all three.
- About 40 to 50 ¢. Megadeth's Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? sits about 42 ¢ under E Standard: tune to E at A 440 and you are 42 ¢ above it, tune to E♭ as popular versions do and you land 58 ¢ below. Radiohead's Planet Telex reads about 47 ¢ sharp on the LP TuneLit measured, and Jimi Hendrix's Love or Confusion about 43 ¢ flat.
- Past the middle. AC/DC's Highway to Hell sits at about A 424, some 63 ¢ under E Standard, and Deep Purple's And the Address at about A 426.
These values come from the owner's own CDs and LPs. How we measure recordings explains the method and its limits, and why records are off pitch explains how they got there.
Questions
Is 5 cents out of tune?
Not in practice. When you play along, 5 ¢ makes at most a faint, slow pulse on long notes. That is why TuneLit rounds a record within 4 ¢ of A 440 to A 440 itself.
Why does my guitar sound wrong with a song when the tuner says it is in tune?
The tuner checks your strings against A 440, and the record may not be there: many older records sit 10 to 40 ¢ away from it. Find the song on TuneLit and press Tune, and the tuner matches the record instead.
Can I train my ear to hear a few cents?
Yes, to a point. Pitch hearing improves with practice, and beats are the easiest way in: play two strings together, listen for the wobble, and turn the peg until it slows down and stops.