Tuning the guitar.

The most important thing for a guitarist is to tune the guitar. When your guitar is tuned, everything that you will play will sound right and melodious. In this tutorial, I will give you information about the most common method that is used to tune your guitar.

As we all aware, the guitar has the following strings:

E,B,G,D,A,E.

I will show it to you in the tab form:

E-------------------
B-------------------
G-------------------
D-------------------
A-------------------
E-------------------

It would be good if you can memorize these strings order. The reason I am telling you about this is because, we will be tuning our guitar in such a way that we hear the sound of E,B,G,D,A,E. This is called standard tuning. The question that will now arise is, How do we do this?

You will need a pitch pipe, keyboard or a piano to hear the E note for your lowest string. The most cost efficient way would be to buy a pitch pipe at your local music store.

The point is that you will have to play the E note with your mouth using the pitch pipe and and match the tone on the guitar's E string. You can do this by blowing the pitch pipe and at the same time alternate pick the E string with your right hand and tighten or loosen the tuning peg to get the desired E sound. When the note on the guitar and the tone on the pitch pipe sounds the same, you have tuned your lowest string.

You have to consider one thing when you try to do this for the first time, you may find this difficult. But the golden rule is not to give up because I feel tuning the guitar is one of an exercise to develop your ear skills.

Developing the ear to recognize different chords or sounds is one of the most important goal for a musician.

So we have tuned one string. We still need to tune the other five strings. You can use the pitch pipe to tune the other strings the way you did with your first string. You just have to blow the B note for the B string, G note for the G string etc.

The another method you can use is a popular one and I will be posting a video lesson soon, as it's difficult to describe it by writing about it.