The first thing you need to do every time you pick a guitar is tune it. Resist the urge to strum and take a minute to set your guitar on tune. Playing an out-of-tune guitar is frustrating for beginners, leading to every single note sounding like a mistake. Apart from this, an out-of-tune guitar will make learning difficult as you won't be able to find whether you are hitting the right notes or not.
Today, with this blog's help, we aim to provide a guide that will teach you exactly how to tune your guitar with and without the tuner. So that when it comes to learning how to play guitar, your basics will be clear.
Easy methods to tune a guitar without using a tuner
A tuner is a device which is a machine that measures out the frequencies that your guitar strings produce. It then processes these frequencies and aligns them with notes in a scale. When the frequency matches the specific note, the display on the tuner will show you the signal, or an LED will light up on the tuner to showcase that the guitar string has achieved the particular tune.
But what if there is no tuner? How will you tune your acoustic guitar, then? Well, given below are the few methods that you can use to tune a guitar without using a tuner.
- You can use a tuning fork to tune your guitar; the most common tuning fork you can find is the one tuned for A string.
- When you hit a tuning fork, it plays the note for which it is designed.
- All you need to do is match the sound of the A string of the guitar with the tuning fork's tune, and you are done.
- Now you might be wondering how to tune the rest of the strings, well, you can get a whole set of tuning forks, but it is not easy to find all of them.
- So the next thing to do is tune the other strings to that one tuned string; in our case, it is string A. Here's how you can do it.
- Start with the low E, your top string, and play the note on the 5th fret of the low E string.
- This note is the same as the one you tuned in A string. You can do vice versa for string A if your E string is tuned, so by this method, you can tune all your strings without needing a tuner.
- Keep in mind the note present on the 5th fret is the same note as the string below it.
How to tune an electric guitar in under 5 minutes
Pedal tuners are great for tuning electric guitars. They get the audio signal from your guitar using a ¼-inch audio cable; it then passes the same audio signal from another ¼-inch cable to see if the guitar is in-tuned or not. Pedal tuners only work with electric and electric-acoustic guitars. Connect your electric guitar with the pedal tuner using the cable via the tuner's input. Now connect the tuner to the power source or if it runs on battery, turn it on.
Now pick one of the strings on your guitar and see how close it is to the tune. The standard tuning for a guitar is E-A-D-G-B-E which goes from thickest to thinnest. After that, if the tuner shows you are off a little bit from the green mark, you need to use the tuning peg placed on your guitar's headstock to adjust the pitch up and down. As you turn the peg, the tuner will catch the sound and show you how much you need to twist to reach the perfect tune. Once the tune is set for the particular string, you must do the same for the rest of the strings.