How to Play in Tune Without Forcing It

You’ve practiced the passage for weeks, and you know exactly where the hard part is: a shift up the fingerboard to a note you can hear perfectly well in your head and can’t quite land on cleanly. As it approaches, your eyes go to your left hand, and you start measuring the distance by feel, steering your finger toward the place it’s supposed to go. The note arrives a little flat.

Before you’ve finished hearing it, your hand jerks upward and overshoots, and now the note is sharp, so you nudge it back down, and by the time it settles the phrase has moved on without you. Afterward your hand aches in a way it didn’t before you started.

Singers know their own version of this, the head pushing up and the throat bracing before a high note, and so does anyone who plays an instrument without frets or keys. Over many years of teaching I’ve seen one form of it so often that I’ve come to expect it: players who second-guess their intonation so hard that they move a note that was already in tune, just to be sure. The note was fine. The doubt wasn’t, and the doubt is what they played.

What almost all of them have in common is that they’re trying to control their notes into tune with muscle. It’s an understandable strategy, since it’s what most of us do by default, and it rests on what I call the lie of trying hard: the belief that more effort equals more effectiveness. Effort helps with certain things in music.

With intonation it gets in the way fast, because you’re asking your thinking mind to do a job it can’t do. It can’t calculate a finger position, or the setting of your vocal folds, to within a few cents of a pitch. What it does instead is grip, since gripping at least feels like control, and a gripping hand is exactly the hand that can’t make a small, fast adjustment when it needs to.

Good intonation works differently, and it starts before you play the note. You audiate it first, meaning you hear the sound you want in your mind, and the wanting is what aims your body. Your body then takes its best guess.

The instant the note begins, you’re listening, and everything arrives at once: the pitch, and the ring or the lack of it. If you play a string instrument, the small sound your finger makes as it lands can tell you something about the pitch before your bow even moves. When you let all of that information through, the correction happens quickly and freely, faster than you could ever plan it. Every note you play in tune starts as a guess, and what makes it sound in tune is how good the guess was and how quickly you adjusted once you heard where you landed.

What guides that adjustment is the part that’s almost never taught: intonation is as much an embodied experience as an aural one. When you hear a note that’s out of tune, no little screen drops down before your eyes, like in The Terminator, flashing “out of tune.” You feel it, as a twinge or a small contraction somewhere in your chest or your gut, and when the note is in tune you feel more open and more relaxed.

Duke Ellington liked to say that if it sounds good, it is good. I’ve long preferred to say that if it feels good, it is good, because music is something you feel as much as something you hear. In my book Soulforce I call this your Inner Audience Member, the part of you that feels something when you hear something, and I wrote this about how to treat what it tells you:

It’s important to note that none of these feelings are good or bad. They are simply information, almost like the speedometer in your car. They are forms of feedback that can help you make appropriate decisions as you create.

For example, while your ultimate aim in the creative act might be to feel more open, noticing when you’re feeling more closed helps you know when you’re getting off track. Similarly, while pleasant feelings are great, unpleasant feelings often provide vital contrast and energy to a creative process that might otherwise be only pleasant to the point of tedium.

Sometimes you may notice no particular feelings at all, just a space or silence within — and that’s okay! An absence of discernible feelings is no more a sign of failure than is a rest between two notes. What matters most is that you’re closely listening to the feedback your Inner Audience Member is sending your way. All feedback is useful feedback.

I’d go a step further than that passage. If you didn’t have that embodied feedback, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether a note was in tune at all. Sounds would just be noise, because it’s the valence of your body’s reaction, more pleasant or less, more open or more contracted, that gives them their meaning.

The flinch you feel at an out-of-tune note is the gauge your intonation runs on, and when you let it, your body adjusts on its own, without your controlling mind interfering.

The word let matters here, because there’s flinching and then there’s flinching. A speedometer doesn’t scold you for doing seventy in a fifty-five zone; it shows you a number, and you ease off the gas. Your heart going “hmm, that’s not quite right” is the speedometer.

Freaking out because you believe poor intonation says something bad about who you are as a person is a different thing altogether, and for a lot of players the flinch arrives carrying exactly that story: I’m not good enough, I should have this by now, everyone heard that. The story is what sets off the jerk, the overshoot, and the hand that aches afterward. Strip it away and the flinch goes back to being information, and information travels to your hand almost instantly.

The usual advice on intonation is mostly fine. Tapes on the fingerboard, tuner apps, slow practice and careful listening all have their place, and when you do them with your controlling mind in charge, they ignore both the tension you bring to every note and the guide you feel in your body. Leave those out and you end up practicing your tension and calling it intonation.

Most people hang on to muscular control for a good reason. If you’re up on a rickety ladder against the side of a house, you won’t let go of it, however rickety it is, unless there’s a sturdy ladder right next to you. Control is the rickety ladder, and the sturdy one is your ear together with the way your body responds to what it hears. You build that second ladder in the practice room, and the best tool I know for building it is a drone.

Set a drone on your phone, or if you play a string instrument, use an open string. Play a note against it and find the spot where it locks in, where the overtones line up and the sound blooms. Notice what that does in your body.

Then go a little flat on purpose and notice what changes, come back, go a little sharp, and come back again. How exactly does your Inner Audience Member feel when you’re sharp or flat, close or far? Get fine-grained about it, because right now you’re tuning your hearing, not just your instrument.

Do it slowly, almost as a meditation, and spend extra time in the keys that give you trouble. Playing out of tune deliberately sounds backward, and it’s the most important part, because you’re teaching your Inner Audience Member what in tune and out of tune feel like, how far off you are, and in which direction. Once your scales feel familiar this way, play your pieces with the drone underneath. The better you know the feeling, the less baggage it carries.

What if your best guess lands way off? In my experience, if you can play the basics on your instrument, your guesses are closer than you think, and the big misses come from reaching for something your playing isn’t ready for yet. Either way the answer is the same: ear training and effortlessness training, and neither one requires effortful control. Both are patient, unhurried work. The hard part is trust, trusting your body to find the note, and the drone is how you earn that trust a few minutes at a time.

If you don’t play professionally, if you play for the love of it, all of this matters more than it looks. Nobody is making you practice. When every session ends with you wincing at your own intonation, you start to play a little less, then a little less again, and one day the case stays closed. Learning to hear the flinch without turning it into a verdict is how you keep the music in your life.

Here is something to try this week. Pick two notes a big leap apart, an octave if you can. Play the leap once the way most of us do by default, steering your finger to the spot or pushing your head and larynx up toward the note, and rate the tension in your body from zero to ten.

Then play the first note and stop. Hear the second note in your mind, want it, and let your body take its best guess. When it lands, pause again before you fix anything, and only then adjust, using 2% less effort.

Rate your tension a second time. If the number drops, notice that you didn’t touch your technique to get there. If it doesn’t, nothing has gone wrong: the drone is where you start, and your body already knows more about where that note lives than your thinking mind ever will.

Joseph Arnold
Violinist, Alexander Technique teacher, and author of Soulforce
SoulforceArts.com

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