Performance

How to Tune Your Guitar

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Tips on how to tune your guitar ready for a performance

How to Tune your Guitar: Have you ever been playing your guitar and you can’t help but think the guitar doesn’t sound quite right? It’s quite possibly because you need to learn how to tune your guitar.

Knowing how to tune your guitar is important as it should be tuned every time you pick it up to play. It’s also wise to check it whilst you are practicing, and especially before a show. Reasons that your guitars tuning could go out of tune include;

  • Temperature change (coming in from the cold to the warm too fast),
  • Knocking it against something or someone
  • Using old strings.

HOT TIP! Buy yourself some high quality strings that suit your style of playing.

How to Tune your Guitar

When learning how to tune your guitar you need what we call a reference note and that tends to be your bottom E. You can get this reference point off a piano, electric tuner or even a guitar tuning app. Once you have this first note, we can begin to tune the rest.

HOT TIP! Find yourself a quiet spot to tune your guitar. It’s easier away from background noise and improves accuracy.

A clever trick to know about how to tune our guitar is that the note on the fifth fret of a string is the equivalent of the open string below it. For example, when you play the fifth fret on the bottom E string, that will be your next reference point for the open fifth string or A note. This works for every string apart from the fourth (G) and fifth (B) strings. This is because of the different string pitches but don’t worry about this for now, it actually makes it even more possible to create great music on a guitar though! Once you’ve got the hang of learning how to tune your guitar, the added extras will come naturally.

More Tips on How to Tune your Guitar

HOT TIP! Go slowly, if you tighten a string too much and too fast, it will break!

After you tune each individual string, you need to make them stay pitch perfect and you can do this by gently stretching them away from the fret board and retuning each time they go out. If possible, get an electric floor tuner to make it easy and fast to tune up.

How to Tune your Guitar – Is it Time Consuming?

Sometimes it takes beginners up to five minutes at a time to tune their guitar and cheaper models with older strings go out of tune a bit quicker than their more expensive friends but keep persevering. With practice, it is possible to learn how to tune your guitar just by using your ears which is a very worthy skill to own in the music world.

HOT TIP! When tuning your guitar, make sure you tune from below pitch because it will remain stable for longer.