How To Tune Guitars

This article is about how to tune guitars. Although newcomers to the guitar can be a bit put off by the job of learning how to tune their newly-acquired instrument, the guitar is not as user-unfriendly as it sometimes seems. The ideal aim of learning how to tune guitars is to develop your ear to the point where you can tune your guitar by ear without the aid of an electronic guitar tuner, tuning fork, pitch pipe, piano or a friend who can do the work for you. This is an ideal which not everyone reaches. Many experienced guitar players need to use tuners to help them get their guitars in tune after many years of playing.

So the first thing to find is a reference for tuning which you are comfortable with. Maybe the first place you should go is YouTube. There are lots of videos on tuning guitars which are just like having someone in the room walking you through it. Online tuners or electronic guitar tuners have tones that match the correct pitch of each string on the guitar. You will be using one of these after you have gotten used to guitar tuning using a video tutorial. If, for some reason you want to try these alternatives to electronic methods, pitch pipes and tuning forks for guitars are available at any store that sells guitars but I really do not see why you would use these primitive gadgets when you can buy or download an electronic tuner that sounds just like a real guitar.

Guitar tuners are made to help you get your guitar into concert pitch which is the term used for the pitch that all guitars are tuned to so that guitarists can play together. In other words, all tuners are set to the same sound frequency. Once you have learnt how guitars are tuned you will be able to get your guitar strings into tune with each other so you can play alone, but usually you will need a tuner to help you tune to concert pitch. I am going to describe how to tune a guitar’s strings to each other once you have the low E – that is, the sixth string – tuned. If you have an electronic tuner you will not need to go through this process but it would be good to learn how to do it so that in the future you are not entirely dependent on the tuner.

Usually you start to tune guitars on the sixth string using whatever kind of tuner you have decided on. The note the open sixth string sounds is E. Once you have your E sounding, place a left hand finger just behind the fifth fret of the guitar, sound the note and while still holding the note, sound the open fifth string. While you are listening to those notes together, turn the tuner on the fifth string until the open fifth string sounds the same as the sixth string at the fifth fret. Do this again to get the fourth string sounding the same as the fifth fret of the fifth string, and again for the fourth and third strings.

To tune the second string place your finger behind the fourth fret of the third string and tune the open second string to that note. Then for the first string go backs to the fifth fret of the second string. If you have a diagram showing the notes on the fretboard, you will see that the open strings on guitars that are tuned in the standard way as I have just described sound the notes E A D G B E. You will also be able to see where these notes appear at various places on the guitar neck. Why not compare your open strings with the notes at different frets to see how they sound together. You may have to go back and adjust your tuning from time to time.

While you are still working on getting the knack of how to tune guitars you might find that the process takes quite a few minutes. Do not worry about this because you will eventually be able to tune any guitars to standard tuning in twenty or thirty seconds.

The guitar tuner in the picture is the free AP Guitar Tuner which I have been using for years.