Tuning Up Your Guitar

Alongside changing strings, another unexciting but necessary procedure that you will quickly get used to performing on your guitar is tuning up. Almost anyone can recognise when a guitar that is being played is out of tune - it does not sound nice. Therefore it's a good idea before progressing any further in the course that we tune up your guitar so that the music which you will soon be playing sounds as it should. Tuning up on the guitar refers to altering the instrument's strings so that they produce certain notes when they are played open (i.e. without any notes being fretted).

The Basics

To change the pitch of the strings on your guitar, their taughtness must be altered. In order to do this, guitars have machine heads which are located on the headstock of the guitar which physically tighten or loosen the strings. To tighten (and raise the pitch of a string) turn its machine head anticlockwise. To loosen the string (and therefore decrease its pitch) turn the machine head clockwise.

So at what pitch should each string be set? The majority of pieces written for the guitar are in 'standard tuning'. To be in standard tuning the strings on your guitar should produce the following notes when they are played without the guitarist placing their fingers on the fretboard (i.e. when they are played 'open'):

6th string (nearest to your head): E
5th string: A
4th string: D
3rd string: G
2nd string: B
1st string (nearest to your feet): E

One popular way to remember the different notes that each string should produce is to use a line such as:

"Every Alsatian Dog Grows Big Ears"

Top^^

Tuning the Guitar to Itself

We now know the note that each string on the guitar should produce when it's played - but how do we know whether the note it is currently producing is too high or too low? One method to use is tuning the guitar to itself. This technique requires that you only take one note from another reference, such as a keyboard, another guitar or tuning fork.

On your chosen reference instrument play an E or listen to this mp3 file of a low E being played on an in-tune guitar. Now play a note on the string nearest to your head (the 'low E' string) and turn its machine head in the correct direction until the note produced by the string is of the same pitch as the note produced by your reference instrument. How difficult you find this procedure will depend on whether you naturally have a 'musical ear' - many guitarists do not find this method of tuning easy at first.

Now that we have one string of the guitar that is in tune, we can tune the other strings in relation to the low E string. There are several methods to do this, the most common based on the principle that playing the low E string fretted at the 5th fret is the same as playing an open A string. Therefore you can repeat the procedure described above for the A string, this time taking your reference as the low E string played at the 5th fret. Alter the A string's machine head until the two are of the same pitch. This procedure can then be repeated for all the strings with one exception - the open B string should be of the same pitch as the G string played at the 4th not 5th fret.

Here is the tablature for tuning your guitar using this method:

--------------0-----------------------------
-----------0--5-----------------------------
--------0--4--------------------------------
-----0--5-----------------------------------
--0--5--------------------------------------
--5-----------------------------------------

Another method of tuning the guitar is to use octave intervals. To use this method play the open low E string and the A string at the 7th fret. Now adjust the A string machine head until the pitch of the two notes is the same. Repeat this for all the strings apart from the tuning of the B string to the G string. In the latter case, the open G must be compared with the note produced from the 8th fret of the B string.

Here is the tablature for tuning your guitar using this method:

--------------7-----------------------------
-----------8--0-----------------------------
--------7--0--------------------------------
-----7--0-----------------------------------
--7--0--------------------------------------
--0-----------------------------------------

Click here to continue page 2 of this lesson >>

Previous lesson: Changing Strings
Next lesson: Basic Musical Theory
Top^^