A guitar tuner can tell you whether a string is sharp or flat. Paul Guy’s site is interested in the much more annoying question: why does the guitar still sound wrong after the tuner says everything is right?
Visit Paul Guy’s Guitar Handbook
Guy has worked as a guitarist, repairer, builder, and tuning specialist for decades, and the site reflects that mixture of practical bench work and musical theory.
Its strongest material digs into fret placement, equal temperament, intonation, string behavior, alternate temperaments, and the compromises built into a fretted instrument.
Twelve equal notes are already a compromise
Standard guitars divide the octave into twelve equal semitones. Mathematically that makes transposition convenient. Acoustically, it means many intervals do not line up exactly with the pure ratios present in natural harmonics.
Guy’s explanations work through the numbers instead of hand-waving around the problem. He shows how the twelfth root of two determines equal-tempered fret spacing, why bridge compensation is necessary, and why changing string length, gauge, action, and fretting pressure alters intonation.
The site also wanders into older tuning systems and the idea of “key colour”—the historical practice of using unequal temperaments in which different keys genuinely had different interval structures.
That interest eventually connected Guy with guitarist and inventor Anders Thidell and the development of True Temperament curved frets. Their work tried to improve guitar intonation by abandoning the assumption that every fret must be a perfectly straight line.
Elsewhere, Guy’s site preserves interviews, workshop material, custom-guitar designs, electronics knowledge, and first-hand commentary from a working repairer rather than a content writer summarizing somebody else’s repair manual.
For players trying to understand why open chords, high frets, thirds, and distortion expose tuning problems differently, the archive remains unusually practical.
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The site does not promise the guitar can be made mathematically perfect. It does something more useful: explains exactly where the imperfections come from.