What Is Guitar Intonation?
Intonation is the accuracy in which a guitar or bass guitar can produce a fretted note. Setting the intonation is the act of adjusting the length of the strings (by moving the bridge saddles) to compensate for the stretching of a string due to pushing it down to the fret board to produce a note. To adjust the intonation of your guitar or bass, you move the bridge saddles toward or away from the fret board until the 12th fret octave and its harmonic are equal and the same open-string note is exactly one octave below those. Accurate intonation is critical to sound quality. When a guitar or bass guitar has an inaccurate intonation setting, you may notice that chords played at the bottom of the neck sound correct, but the same chord played higher up the fret board have some notes that become out of tune, making the chords sound more like noise than music. An example is that you may play an open A on the 5th (or 3rd) string together with the same note on the 6th (or 4th) string to add depth
