March 8, 2026
Fret Wars: Math vs Mojo
Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
Math vs mojo: your guitar won’t be “perfectly” in tune—and players are fine with it
TLDR: Perfect tuning is impossible because guitar strings create overlapping pitches and our standard tuning system is a compromise. The crowd split between “music isn’t math” purists and nerds defending equal temperament, with calls to retune per song and jokes about tuning to vibes.
A mathy explainer claimed your guitar can’t be perfectly tuned because strings make lots of hidden pitches (harmonics), and prime-number math means some notes never lock together. Enter the crowd: Team Mojo vs Team Math. One veteran chimed in with zen wisdom: noticing you can’t get every string perfect is the moment you level up (sgarrity). Another fired back, “Absurd”—if your guitar’s within tolerance, it’s in tune, stop worshipping lab numbers (52-6F-62). Cue the engineers vs artists cage match. Then a banjo cameo: a link to Alison Brown’s harmonic “bell” trick turned the thread into show-and-tell (video), proving that those ghost notes are part of the magic. The hottest philosophical fight? 12-tone equal temperament (the modern standard that slices an octave into 12 equal steps). It’s a compromise: every chord is slightly off, equally, so nothing is perfect—and nothing is awful. amelius asked the flamethrower question: why not tune to the actual notes in a song and ditch the one-size-fits-all? xandrius pushed for receipts, demanding the “Absurd” take be explained, while commenters joked about “tuning to vibes,” “prime numbers ruining C major,” and tuners that read “¯_(ツ)_/¯.” The consensus? The math explains the mess—but musicians turn that mess into music.
Key Points
- •Perfect tuning is limited by mathematical constraints—harmonic frequency ratios do not divide evenly.
- •Pitch corresponds to a string’s vibration frequency, measured in hertz; A4 is standardized at 440 Hz.
- •A plucked string produces multiple frequencies simultaneously due to harmonics (overtones/partials).
- •Harmonics can be isolated by lightly touching the string at fractional points (1/2, 1/3, 1/4), which suppresses other modes.
- •Octaves reflect a 2:1 frequency ratio; this and other harmonic relationships underpin Western tuning practices.