Sunday, January 13, 2013

How to Tune Your Guitar



You can change the note of any given string by how you tune it.


The Basics

The principles of tuning a guitar is easy—turn the tuning button tightens the string which raises the pitch of the string. Turning it in the other direction loosens the string, which lowers the pitch.

As a beginner, you want to have your guitar in standard tuning. That means that the notes you want to tune to, from the lowest (the sixth or thickest) string to the highest (the first or thinnest) one, are E, A, D, G, B, and E. Notice that the first and sixth strings share note names. When you strike them together (after they are properly tuned!) they sound somewhat similar, although the first string sounds higher than the sixth.



Notes of your guitar strings in standard tuning.


Using a Guitar Tuner

If you have a guitar tuner, getting in tune is very easy. When you play each string, the tuner will indicate whether its pitch is sharp (higher) or flat (lower) using a virtual meter (where you normally want the pitch indicator—the meter’s needle—to line up in the middle of the range on the screen) or by colored lights or a beep to show when your string is in tune.



A typical chromatic guitar tuner.


Place the tuner close to the guitar (on your knee works nicely), turn it on, and then strike the sixth, or low-E, string (the thick string closest to you) with either a pick or your thumb. Be sure to strike just the one target string.

Many tuners are chromatic tuners, meaning that when you strike a string, the display screen shows you the name of the note you’re playing and then you adjust accordingly. So if you’re trying to tune the sixth string to E and the screen says you’re on D or E, then you are flat, or too low, and you should turn the tuning peg so that you’re tightening the string and raising the note. If your tuner reads “F,” “F,” or even “G,” then your string is sharp, or too high, and you want to loosen the string.



Turning the tuning pegs.


Tip: It’s best to tune your strings up to the proper note. If you tune down to get a note, the natural tendency of the string is to continue to loosen—not a lot, but enough to put you out of tune eventually. So if you find that a string is higher than it should be, loosen the string to below the note and then tighten it to the proper note. This helps the string stay in tune.

Relative Tuning
If you know that one of your strings is in tune, you can tune the others by means of relative tuning. You can find each note of your guitar in multiple places on the neck, except for some of the highest notes on your first (thinnest) string and those played on the first four frets of the lowest (thickest) one.

Check out this chart of all 12 notes:

C             C/         D             D/        E              F              F/         G             G/        A             A/      
               D                         E                                        G                       A                        B
                    
Each of these notes is a musical half-step away from its neighbor, and each fret of your guitar is a half-step. So when you place a finger on the first fret of your low-E (sixth or thickest) string, you change the note from E to F. The note at the second fret is F (or G, if you prefer), and so on. Here is a fretboard map to show you all the notes along the neck of your guitar, from the open strings to the fifth fret.




Notes up to the fifth fret.


This means that the note at the fifth fret of your low-E string is A, which is the note of your open fifth string—the A string.

Once you’ve gotten your sixth string in tune, match the tone of the A note at the fifth fret to that of the open string and adjust it accordingly. Likewise, the note at the fifth fret of the A string is D, and the note at the fifth fret of the D string is G.

B, however, is just four half-steps higher than G, so you match the open B string to the note at the fourth fret of the G string. Finally, match the open high-E (first) string to the note at the fifth fret of the B string to finish getting your guitar in tune.

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