Learn Why and How to Tune a Guitar
A Step-by-Step Beginner's Guide To Tuning Guitars
It's important to learn how to properly tune a string instrument if you're planning on learning how to play it.
The most important thing to know how to do when learning how to play the guitar is learning how to tune it. Given that standard tuning on a guitar is, starting at the bass string, E-A-D-G-B-E, here is a simple way to learning how to tune your guitar.
Getting that First Note Right
Without a reference to assign a note to, someone who is unfamiliar with music will likely have problems trying to tune that first E string. There are a few simple solutions that you can try.
First, you can play an E note on a piano (granted that it is tuned properly) or a keyboard, where you don’t have to worry about tuning. To make things easier, when you play the E key, use the sustain pedal so that both hands can be used to tune the guitar. After playing an E on the piano, start plucking the low-E string on the guitar and start turning the tuning peg (found on the head of the guitar) until the note sounds the same.
If the notes are starting to sound pretty close and you don’t know when the note sounds exactly the same, try paying attention to the vibrations of the guitar. When two dissimilar notes are being played, the note will sound wavy, the farther the notes are from each other, the closer together the waves will sound. As the notes become closer together, the waves will slow down. Two notes that are exactly the same will have no wave-like sound.
If you don’t have a piano or a keyboard, another useful gadget for tuning a guitar is a tuner. Although some may look at it as "cheating", a guitar tuner is one of the easiest ways to make sure that all strings are in tune. Another, lesser known, option is to use the telephone. A dial tone is actually the sound of an F note. By plucking the E string while holding down the string on the first fret, you will play the F note. Similar to how you tuned the guitar to the piano, match the sounds of the string you are plucking to that of the dial tone. Once the first string is tuned, you can easily move on to tune the remaining strings.
Tuning the Other Strings
Once the bass note on a guitar is tuned, the other strings are much easier to tune. Each string’s note is 5 steps higher than the next (with the exception of the B string, which is 4), making it easy to tune them to one another. If you press down on the low E string on the fifth fret and pluck it, you will be playing an A note. Similar to how you tuned the E string, turn the tuning peg that corresponds to the A string and match the sound of an open plucked A string to that of the E string being played on the fifth fret.
If this seems confusing, here is a diagram using guitar tablature to help better describe it. If you are not familiar with guitar tablature, refer to the article Learn To Play Guitar by Tablature.
E----x---x---x---x-0-
B----x---x---x-0-x-5-
G----x---x-0-x-4-x---
D----x-0-x-5-x---x---
A--0-x-5-x---x---x---
E--5-x---x---x---x---
Seen in this diagram, with the column of “x” separating different notes, each note played on the fifth (or fourth for the G string) corresponds with an open note played on the string above it. Each set of “5-0” and “4-0” notes are the exact same note.
By working your way up from tuning the low E string, all the way up to the high E string, you should have no problems tuning your guitar. One last step you can take, just to make sure that you tuned it properly, is to pluck both the open low and open high E strings at the same time to make sure that they have the same sound.
