Tuning a Guitar

If you learn to play all the chords in the world correctly your guitar is still going to sound like a sack full of crabbit cats if even just one of your strings is out of tune. If you are playing on your own you'll just embarrass yourself and if you are playing with others they are going to hate you because you are making them sound bad!!

All the great playing in the world is not going to help you, if your guitar is not correctly tuned you might as well not play, in fact you'd be better not to! Tuning is a fundamental of playing so you need to get it right. Don't worry; help is at hand right here.

What does an out of tune guitar sound like? Well, if you are reading this the chances are that you know precisely what it sounds like, but just in case you don't, the two links provided below will demonstrate this. In both I play the same simple chord progression playing EXACTLY the same chords.

However, the first is with a tuned guitar and the second is played with just ONE string out of tune. Give them a listen to hear the difference.

Convinced that tuning is essential? Good. So how do you go about getting it right?

There are a number of methods for tuning your guitar, and I'm going to show you each in turn. Pick the one that you feel the most comfortable with, but in reality, eventually you will probably use all of them, or a combination of them. There are also a few tools such as a tuning fork or an electronic guitar tuner you can use to make the process a less painful, and I will detail each of these.

I will first show you tuning a guitar using standard tuning. What is standard guitar tuning? It's what the vast majority of guitarist tune their guitars to, with the notes EADGBE, running from the 6th (the thickest string) to the 1st string (thinnest).

Right, lets go to work...

Let's see how to tune a guitar...

Back From - Tuning a Guitar

Guitar Tunings - Open Tunings

Guitar Tunings - Alternative Tunings

Guitar Tunings - 7 String Tunings