Tuning a Guitar

There are a couple of ways to tune a guitar. Firstly for the basics, your tuning knobs are at the end of the guitar, as you tighten or loosen these knobs, the pitch of the notes played with the strings will change.

Tuning by ear involves hearing a tone and getting your open string notes to match the tone you are hearing. The most common tuning for a guitar are the notes E, A, D, G, B, E for the six strings from the lowest string (pitch wise) to the highest pitched string.

Here is a nice tool I found to give you the tones of your six strings. You can turn on each string and then get the tone to tune to.

A common method of tuning a guitar, particularly if you end up gigging is to use an electronic guitar tuner. Simply plug in the guitar and play an open string. The tuner will then guide you if you need to raise or lower the pitch.

Finally, sometimes you may not have a tuner or even a reference pitch available. In this case, you can tune the guitar so that the strings are in tune with themselves, even if they might not be in tune to a standard pitch.

To do this, play the 5th fret of the 6th string and the open 5th string, both these notes should be A so you can get these strings in tune with each other. You then move up the strings tuning the 5th fret of the 5th string (D) to the open 4th string and so on.

The corresponding strings and frets to use when tuning like this are as follows

Here is a good youtube video from Marty at Guitar Jamz that takes you through what I just described here.