I just tried to find a video of it, and couldn't...but, it's hard to search for "tuning guitar with fourths and fifths" because it brings back information about various kinds of tunings for guitar rather than using it as a method for tuning.
It's kinda weird; I assumed it was something common, but now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it that didn't learn it from that same teacher or from me. The professor who taught it to me was a teacher at University of Miami during the Jaco/Metheny era in the early 70s, toured with Bruce Hornsby for a few years, and then worked in LA as a session musician for a couple of decades (he was never famous, but traveled in famous circles), so I assumed he got it from one of those places and that it would be kinda common knowledge.
I should dig into this more, and if it's not common knowledge somewhere I should make a video (and a cult) about it, because it's really the bee's knees, IMHO. It's super fast to use, once you've got good ears for it, and it results in any guitar, even those with poor intonation, being at least playable for basic chords and such in the first position.
It isn't really complicated. You can derive it from first principles of just knowing that fourths and fifths and octaves are perfect intervals, and then just make chord shapes that are all fourths and fifths and octaves of any other note being played and walk them up and down across the strings until you've got no beating (or as little beating as is achievable, if the intonation is poor). By the time you've gone up and down a couple of times, you're pretty well locked in and it sounds great. Even if you don't have an ear for fourths and fifths, you can still use this to "tighten up" the tuning on a guitar by doing the usual fifth fret/fourth fret tuning that every beginner book or class teaches first and following up with this method to come to a reasonable compromise with the intonation of the guitar and the oddities of wound vs unwound strings (the fourth/third or third/second string changeover is always a bit tricky even with a compensated bridge).
Anyway, I'll keep poking at the google to see if I can find this method documented somewhere, and if not, I'll write it up and make a video. It really should be more commonly known/used now that I think of it.
Edit: This Stack Exchange thread includes people who do either fourths or fifths tuning, which is close to what I'm talking about, but they never quite get to stacking up fourths, fifths and octaves in a few chord shapes (which is where, I think, the magic for compensating for intonation problems comes from). https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/3078/what-are-the-...
It's kinda weird; I assumed it was something common, but now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it that didn't learn it from that same teacher or from me. The professor who taught it to me was a teacher at University of Miami during the Jaco/Metheny era in the early 70s, toured with Bruce Hornsby for a few years, and then worked in LA as a session musician for a couple of decades (he was never famous, but traveled in famous circles), so I assumed he got it from one of those places and that it would be kinda common knowledge.
I should dig into this more, and if it's not common knowledge somewhere I should make a video (and a cult) about it, because it's really the bee's knees, IMHO. It's super fast to use, once you've got good ears for it, and it results in any guitar, even those with poor intonation, being at least playable for basic chords and such in the first position.
It isn't really complicated. You can derive it from first principles of just knowing that fourths and fifths and octaves are perfect intervals, and then just make chord shapes that are all fourths and fifths and octaves of any other note being played and walk them up and down across the strings until you've got no beating (or as little beating as is achievable, if the intonation is poor). By the time you've gone up and down a couple of times, you're pretty well locked in and it sounds great. Even if you don't have an ear for fourths and fifths, you can still use this to "tighten up" the tuning on a guitar by doing the usual fifth fret/fourth fret tuning that every beginner book or class teaches first and following up with this method to come to a reasonable compromise with the intonation of the guitar and the oddities of wound vs unwound strings (the fourth/third or third/second string changeover is always a bit tricky even with a compensated bridge).
Anyway, I'll keep poking at the google to see if I can find this method documented somewhere, and if not, I'll write it up and make a video. It really should be more commonly known/used now that I think of it.
Edit: This Stack Exchange thread includes people who do either fourths or fifths tuning, which is close to what I'm talking about, but they never quite get to stacking up fourths, fifths and octaves in a few chord shapes (which is where, I think, the magic for compensating for intonation problems comes from). https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/3078/what-are-the-...