Tuning Your Guitar

So you have a guitar, that’s awesome. Now you have to tune it. Tuning the guitar is by far one of the most frustrating things that new students complain to me about all the time. There’s really no way to learn this other than doing it over and over again.

In my lessons with students I have spend full lessons untuning their guitar, handing it back to them and having them tune it again, and again and again. On occasion I thought the instrument might be thrown back at me, but I can safely say that most of my students got it after a while.

Although you can “self-tune”-which is the process of tuning your guitar to the E string no matter if it is right or not, is okay, you really should put some effort into getting the E string right. I recommend a guitar pitch pipe but if you have a piano that would work also.

The 6th string (the one closest to you/the heavest or lowest sounding string) is always your starting point. Using the pitch pipe or the E note below middle C on the piano, tune your guitar up or down so your E string sounds like that note. Humming the two sometimes help you get your bearings and eventually you will find it.

Next, put your finger on the 5th fret of the 6th string and pluck it, then pluck the open 5th string (open means no fingers) tune the 5th string to sound like the 6th string with a covered 5th fret. After you get that move your finger down to the 5th string covered 5th fret and do the same for the 4th string tuning it to meet the 5th strings sound.

Continue on the 4th string, again 4th string covered 5th fret will equal the open 3rd string. On the 3rd string you cover the 4th fret; it is the only string when you are not on the 5th fret. The 3rd string covered 4th fret equals the open 2nd string. The 2nd string covered 5th fret equals the open 1st string and you are done.

The trick to tuning the guitar is to then play a chord and identify the string that sounds off to tweak it. There will always be a string off; it’s just the nature of the sliding the strings do when they stretch and so forth. The real success in tuning is this step. And unfortunately, the only way to get go at this step is to do it over and over again until you know the sound well enough that you can find it and fix it.