Tuning Questions

[Analogheart]

Ok so I had a couple of lessons with bass and the teacher was getting me to plug in to a tuner and tune to that every time.
Now I was trying to play this song's bass (27) Quantum Leap - YouTube and a lot of tab has it starting on a D BUT it doesn't sound right. It sound off. (2) QUANTUM LEAP BASS by John Maus @ Ultimate-Guitar.Com I notices with a lot of new wave/post punk type stuff the key sounds a bit off. So I played around a bit and it's more somewhere around Db-D. So what I'm asking is is it best to not bother with the tuner then or just go with it for a ballpark and fine tune to a song....I'm confused because everyone thinking it's D but it doesn't sound it at all. Help!!

 

[ddnidd1]

Not all recordings are A 440 for a variety of reasons.

When learning a song, tune to the song. Otherwise rely on the tuner.

 

[albertus]

Not all recordings are A 440 for a variety of reasons.

When learning a song, tune to the song. Otherwise rely on the tuner.

exactly, specially in old songs recorded pre-digital. the most common thing was to speed up or down the tape to change slightly the tempo of the song. that affected the overall tuning

 

[LeeNunn]

Instead of retuning your bass all the time, you might consider tuning the recording. Most loop and slowdown software programs allow you to change the pitch by octaves (raise an octave to hear the bass line), half steps (to change the key), and cents (to fine tune the pitch, especially for older recordings). I use Transcribe! but there are lots of options as you can see in the link below. Amazing Slow Downer seems very popular here on TalkBass.
Transcription Resources. Software to slow down music. (seventhstring.com)

 

[Analogheart]

Great. Thanks for the tips much appreciated thought I was going mad or tone deaf!!

 

[Yonni]

The Moises app can do this. You need to import tracks as mp3 but it will identify the tuning and you can retune the track or adjust your tuner pedal to match. Moises also splits tracks by instrument and speeds up or slows down while maintaining pitch. Its not perfect but worth the price. Apparently it was developed as part of the sound editing for the recent Beatles docu of previously unreleased footage.