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I may not be much of a guitar player, but at least my guitar is in tune and my bends are in tune...
It's an interesting subject. I watched the first couple of series of Boardwalk Empire and actually rather liked the Brian Jamestown Massacre intro music despite the, er, creative use of tuning. I know it really sets some peoples' teeth on edge.
Maybe that partly because I've listened to many albums before the days of electronic tuners when loud bands often really struggled to stay in tune. There's an obvious Stonesey vibe to this: their best known live album, Get Yer Ya Ya's Out, was notoriously out of tune but many people (including teenage me) loved it all the same. So there's a kind of nostalgia for slightly out of tune music being channeled here.
Or is the OP referring to ear-training as in, identifying intervals, chords, chord voicings, inversions etc quickly or struggling to do so, which is a slightly different thing to hearing something's in or out of tune?
So it is a tolerance thing, and I think it is a skill that develops over time. Just because the tuner says the open strings are in tune doesn't mean the chords will be, but most people don't notice until they've developed their ear
From an interview with the wonderful Ray Crawford, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist (flute, Hammond etc) who played with many of the jazz greats and was responsible for one of my favourite guitar solos, on Tom Waits's Blue Valentine:
MW: What did guitarists do fifty years ago? Like Robert Johnson, did he change his strings? Could he afford to?
What strikes me is that these guys almost certainly had a great sense of intonation, but they still had a tolerance that allowed them to enjoy music that wasn't very well intonated.I didn't- I had to work at it.
How much do you play?
How much do you work on ear training?
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Whether its been amplified for me because you guys said it was out of tune though I dont know!
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
I'm quite aware of things being out of tune playing live and it just feels uncomfortable when they are. it doesn't make my playing any better or any worse! I'm also pretty dependent on a tuner because when I tune by ear I'll get it spot on with open, or a chord, but then be uncomfortable with another chord, and a tuner kind of averages it out so I can tolerate the differences.
I quite like that ''out of tune'' type effect, its raw and honest.
Reminded me of this.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
Similarly, where there is an element of performance involved, such as singing at the same time or improvisation, or just stage antics, these things can feed a greater tolerance to tuning deviations. Same with hearing old music (as per the Ray Crawford interview quoted above) or hearing something played on a vintage instrument that may not have great intonation but which has an interesting sound. I can hear out of tune playing in those settings and actually quite enjoy the frisson and authenticity it can lend to the music. Similarly, not all genres have the same sense of intonation. Bill Monroe's singing sounds pretty out of tune until you listen to a lot of old time fiddle music, then you come back to it and - well it still sounds out of tune but it makes sense as to how and why it's intoned the way it is.
There's a world of difference between that, though, and someone playing something that is supposed to be in tune (like a cover of an iconic solo that definitely was recorded in tune, or a classical piece etc) and there are no mitigating circumstances as to why it might not be. Then I'm afraid it just smacks of laziness and/or fucked up musical priorities and it stops that piece of music being enjoyable to listen to.