Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Guitar Tuning’ Category

One kind of guitar tuner is called a pitch pipe. A guitar pitch pipe has six mouthpieces that correspond to the open strings of the guitar. You blow into the bottom E mouthpiece and you get the bottom E note from a vibrating bit of metal inside the mouthpiece. Simple. You hold the pitch pipe in your mouth while you turn the guitar tuners.

These guitar tuners are readily available from music stores and are a handy way to keep your guitar in tune once you have got used to the difference in sound between a wind instrument and a string instrument. The pitch in a pitch pipe can vary because wear and tear can affect the metal reed inside, as can humidity.

If you want to try out tuning your guitar with a pitch pipe, this video will help:

Another popular type of guitar tuner is the tuning fork. I guess it was a temptation to call them pitch forks but the name was already taken. You hit the tuning fork on a handy piece of durable furniture or your knee and it produces the note A at the fifth fret of the first string.

To use a tuning fork pluck the A string with your right hand finger or a pick while a finger of your left hand is lightly damping the string above the fifth fret. Once you have plucked the string, take your left hand finger away and you should hear the harmonic note sounding. Now hit the tuning fork on your knee and hold the bottom of the fork against the body of the guitar. You have to be quick to do this before the sound of the guitar’s harmonic dies away. Once you have the knack of getting the fork and the guitar to sound together, you adjust the fifth string until the guitar harmonic sounds exactly in unison with the note from the fork.

To continue tuning, pick the A note at the fifth fret of the first string and tune it to your open fifth string. Or fret the E at the seventh fret of the fifth string and tune the first string to that.

Here is a video on tuning a guitar using a tuning fork:

Tuning the guitar using a tuning fork is a little awkward and long winded to explain and a little tricky to do at first but as with all things that need effort, it gives you freedom. The tuning fork will never go out of tune, if you lose yours you can borrow somebody elses and you won’t need to depend on the support of an electronic tuner.

Buying an electronic guitar tuner is not really necessary if you are short of money, and you can download a free guitar tuner from the internet that you can use on your computer.

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A guitar tuner is an amazing help to guitar players of all stages of expertise. Every guitar player should learn how to use a guitar tuner early in his career. They are small and compact and will come to your aid when your ear is too tired and emotional to tune your guitar with any accuracy. For many guitarists, tuning the guitar is more difficult than playing it, and a lot of time is wasted at gigs and during lessons trying to tune guitars by ear.

The notes on the open strings of the guitar are E A D G B E. Guitar tuners come in several different forms and perform the work of tuning guitars to varying degrees of completeness.

Although a guitar player tuning his guitar by ear might look cool, the fact is that nobody’s ear is as good as a decent electronic tuner. You could forget all about trying to train your ear altogether and just make sure your guitar tuner goes everywhere that you and your guitar go.

An electronic guitar tuner tells the guitarist if the note he is playing on each open string of his guitar is at the correct frequency. Electronic guitar tuners can vary greatly in price but the most expensive is not necessarily the best. Some tuners are just LEDs you can carry on stage with you to tune your guitar on the fly, some tuners are able to tune many different instruments.

There are many guitar tuners available online that simply sound the notes that correspond to the open strings of the guitar and the guitar player has to use his ear to match his guitar to the sound of the tuner.

There are also tuners that are available as free downloads from the internet. Some of these have several different displays to help you tune your guitar accurately and some can tune to various alternate tunings. Learning how to use a guitar tuner of this type would be a good move for any learner guitarist.

Low priced guitar tuners that you can buy at music stores use a similar method but the difference is that the tuner also has a needle that will indicate how close your tuning is. There are slightly more expensive guitar tuners that do a similar job but have a better quality display.

There is a guitar tuner that clips onto the guitar and “feels” the vibrations coming through the guitar when the open strings are played. Although we can’t hear the comparison with this kind of tuner, the result is a little better than with your basic LED display and getting to know how to use this kind of guitar tuner is a little easier.

The capo is a barre that clamps across the strings of your guitar in much the same way as your index finger does when you are playing a barre chord. It is usually made of rubber or metal and it is clamped to the guitar neck by means of an elastic band or a clamp.

The cheapest type of capo is basically an elastic band attached to a strip of rubber. It’s probably best to buy a few at a time because they can get stolen and lost, or simply wear out. The good thing is that you can carry it in your pocket, and quickly put it on your guitar when it is needed.

If you are reading this then you are probably wandering how the notes are altered by a capo on the guitar. The capo raises the key you are playing in without you having to learn more chords or to get an arrangement of a song in another key.

Let’s say you are playing a song in G using the G, C, and D chords. If you put the capo on the second fret the song would now be in the key of A with the chords A, D and E.

Basically all your chord shapes are the same with the capo but if you have the capo on the second fret, the sound is a half note higher than the guitar without the capo. So it’s really just like putting a barre across the strings with your index finger except that with the capo your index finger is now free to play notes.

Another common question about the capo is whether it is possible to barre only some of the strings. The answer is yes, you can buy capos to use on the third, fourth and fifth strings or the second, third and fourth strings. Using this kind of capo is just another way of producing and effect like an alternate tuning.

Guitarists who are not using the capo as a way of changing key for a singer sometimes use a capo to vary the pitch of the guitar simply to provide variety in their guitar’s sound. If you play some songs without the capo and some songs withe the capo at the third fret and some with the capo at the fifth or the seventh fret your audience is less likely to allow your music to fade into the background. A well-known example of this is George Harrison’s use of the capo at the seventh fret on If I Needed Someone and Here Comes The Sun.