subject: Guitar Tuning Secrets - 4 Hot Tips for Tuning a Guitar [print this page] Guitar Tuning Secrets - 4 Hot Tips for Tuning a Guitar
Guitar Tuning is Fundamental
Before you can get serious about your mission to learn guitar fast, you need to make sure your guitar is in tune. This is absolutely fundamental to your success as a guitarist, but it is one of the most overlooked elements of playing guitar.
Imagine this, you've got your guitar back home from the guitar store and you're desperate to begin the business of learning how to play it. You don't want to spend time tuning your guitar because you don't want to waste precious practice time with such a mundane task. At any rate, that's what many beginners think. Most folks start out learning the guitar so that they can play their favourite songs and they are keen to get straight into learning a few chords so that they can strum along with some cool songs. They've found some tab, have identified some easy guitar songs to get busy with and their next step is to practice their chosen song until they master it.
Well that's all fine and dandy, and it can be tremendously exciting to believe that you simply need to get the hang of 3 little chords to be able to strum along with your favourite musician and get the immense satisfaction from playing an actual song as opposed to practising scales up and down all day long on your guitar. There's just one little problem with jumping right into playing and glossing over the guitar tuning element and it is that, well to be honest, your guitar will almost certainly be out of tune.
So, even if you are a guitar demi-god and can play your chosen song in your sleep, it will sound terrible due to the fact that you are out of tune - and out of tune sounds bad whether you're a good guitarist or an also ran.
Tuning a Guitar Improves Your Ear
When I began to learn guitar my ear was not all that good, in fact it was really quite poor. I did not receive much musical tuition whilst at school and none of my family played an instrument so I was not used to thinking about music from the point of view of a musician.
Don't get me wrong, I listened to a lot of music, but I never really listened to it properly and I certainly didn't understand the technical ins and outs of it. I had difficulty determining which of two notes was the higher if they were very close together in terms of pitch. This gave me awful difficulties when I tried tuning my guitar. I'd spend a long time attempting to do it correctly and often quit. I realised the strings were a little out of tune but I just couldn't get it sorted out.
Eventually I took the easy option and purchased an electronic guitar tuner. This was great in the sense that it got me past my tuning problem and ensured I got my guitar properly in tune before each time I practised. However, it didn't help me to train my ear musically at all. In actual fact, I think that if I had persisted with tuning by ear I could've obtained a good musical ear much more quickly.
That's why I urge all new guitarists not to lean too heavily on an electronic guitar tuner. Each time you sit down to play, you must begin by tuning a guitar correctly, and you must use your ear. It's fine to use an electronic guitar tuner on occasion, for example if you are in noisy surroundings or as a cross-check if you are laying down a recording or performing in front of an audience. In the main though, you need to make sure your ear is sharp and tuning your guitar by ear before each time you play it is an excellent strategy for doing this.
Tuning a Guitar in 4 Easy Steps
Well, how is guitar tuning done correctly? It's really straightforward when you know how.
The most common approach is to tune each string relative to the one before it on the guitar. When I say before, I mean the string located physically above; the string positioned above the one you are tuning is thicker gauged and deeper in pitch.
You pluck the thicker string at the correct fret to give a note at the required pitch to tune the thinner string that is located below it. The exact method is as follows.
1. Tune the sixth string (thickest and lowest in pitch) to the correct note using an instrument that you know is already in tune. Or you could use a tuning pipe or similar reference for this. If you don't want to purcharse a tuning fork for this, you can easily use a reference note from an online guitar tuner.
2. Play the fifth fret of the sixth string and the open fifth string (i.e. not holding down the fifth string against any fret).
3. Using the tuning pegs, correct the tension of the fifth string until both strings produce a note of the same pitch.
4. After you have completed this initial step, you simply repeat the process by plucking the fifth fret of the fifth string and the open fourth string and so on across all of the strings. For each one, play the fifth fret of the string above to tune the next string with one notable exception to the rule. For the 2nd string, you tune it to the fourth fret of the third string.
Click the link to get more advice and easy to follow instructions on how to learn guitar fast. http://www.squidoo.com/discover-the-best-way-to-learn-guitar/
