How To Play Guitar
Learning to Tune Your Guitar By Ear
Most beginner guitar players tune their guitar using an electric tuner. It is of course the most logical way seeing that there are these small tuning devices for just the job.
What if you don’t have a tuner handy? You could be at a store playing a guitar for sale, a friends place who doesn’t own a tuner or around a camp fire trying to play sing-a-long songs.
Knowing how to tune your guitar by ear is an important beginner skill and that’s what we’re going to cover today. At the end of this lesson there’s a short video that covers everything we talk about here and provides a walk-through example. Take a few minutes to watch that video after you’re done reading.
The Magic of the 5th Fret
Tuning your guitar by ear isn’t difficult. There are only three things you must keep in mind.
1.)The note of any given string is the same as the 5th fret played on the string above it
2.)There is one exception, the B string is the same as the 4th fret on the G string above it
3.)To tune the low E, or 6th string either match it to the tone of the open high E string or play the 5th fret of the B string (note the low E should be one octave lower then the E played on the 5th fret of the B string.
Example: The D string seems a bit out of tune on your guitar, to test you can play the 5th Fret of the A string above it and then strike the open D string. If the D seems like it’s lower or higher then the 5th fret of the A string adjust it with the tuning peg.
Be Careful
It can happen that the string you’re tuning to (in above example you would be tuning to the A string on the 5th Fret) is out of tune. If you sense this might be the case take a moment to first check the tuning of the string in question (in example above the A string). You can do this by verifying the tuning with the string above it.
Practicing
It’s a good idea to practice this technique each day you sit down to play. Before you start practicing take a few minutes to check all your strings to ensure they’re in tune. This will get faster as you practice and eventually become second nature.
Take a few minutes now to watch the video below. It covers the same concepts as in this article then walks you through a sample tuning of all the strings on your guitar.
Interested in becoming a better guitar player? Ever consider taking some guitar lessons for beginners? You can, and you don’t have to leave home to do it either. Thanks to online video lessons and DVD’s you can study guitar at home and improve your playing fast.
January 9, 2010 at 9:58 pm | Learn Guitar Tuning | 6 comments
It is pretty easy to tune the guitar by ear when there is no sounds and noise around, but is much harder to do it on stage when all other instruments are making noise I personally recommend a tuner especially if You are doing a recording session in studio.
How To Easily Tune Your Guitar By Ear…
A simple easy to use system you can implement right now for tuning your guitar more efficiently…
tuning you guitar by ear is super important if you are serious about becoming a top notch guitarist. Sure, it’s easy to tune with an electronic tuner, but first you will need to get your strings somewhere near the correct pitch. Learning by ear will also be useful for knowing when your guitar is even a little bit out of tune and an electronic tuner will not always be around. Great lesson!
Nice lesson, well explained. The wrong tuning can really put beginners off, so it is an essential step to get right, but it does take time.
When you get good at it, also check out tuning by harmonics which is an alternative to the method used here.
Keep practicing.
So the question I get asked all the time is, how do you know when you have the first string tuned to E? Showing someone how to go up the 5th fret/4th fret tuning process is relatively easy, but getting the pitch of that first string seems to be the challenge. Any ideas?
Hey Chris. There are a few ways to do this.
First of all unless you’re part of a very select group you will not be able to pick the correct pitch out of mid air. Very few people have this ability. This is called perfect pitch.
There is good news though. We might not be able to pick a pitch at random but 99% of people are able to tell the difference between pitches. This is called relative pitch. If you can hum your favorite song or whistle a tune you can use relative pitch to find the tone of the first string.
All you do is to tune the string to the required note on a piano, pitch pipe or tuning fork. Sometimes beginners worry that they won’t be able to do this but, if you concentrate and listen carefully it’s not that bad.
If you’re still struggling, buy an electronic tuner then tune the top string with it. Tune the rest of the strings using the 5th fret relative pitch method. As you do this more and more your ability to hear the difference between notes will get better and better. Eventually you won’t need the tuner and you can use the previous methods.