Tune In To This Blog: Free Online Guitar Tuner

A girl having a hard time tuning her guitar. Photo Source

What If you don't have a piano, a pitch pipe, a tuning fork, or an electronic tuner?...

Worse, what if you still don't know how to tune your guitar to itself using the relative tuning method?...

Well, I have a good news for you.

"YOU CAN STILL GET YOUR GUITAR TUNED"

How?

How To Tune Your Guitar With An Electronic Tuner

The skill of tuning a guitar is the most important thing a guitarist needs to learn. It does not matter how good you play a piece of music if your instrument is out of tune, it will sound bad. Tuning the guitar is usually very difficult for a beginner and it will take time and patience to master it. Thus, I would certainly recommend using an electronic tuner, most especially if you are just starting out with a guitar. This is perhaps the quickest and most accurate way to get your guitar in tune.

How an Electronic tuner looks like. Photo Credits.

How does a tuning fork work

Have you tried tuning your guitar to a tuning fork?

Okay, a tuning fork actually looks like this:

Tuning fork.Photo Source.

Well, at the time of this writing, I still haven't tried tuning my guitar to a tuning fork. The truth is, I haven't seen anyone yet using this kind of tuning method. The local guitar stores doesn't seem to have this one on stock.

I did a little research over the Internet about how to use this thing. It's fairly simple once you are good at discerning pitches. A tuning fork only offers a single pitch tuning reference commonly known a the "A-440 Pitch".

Get It Right With The Pitch Pipe

Have you seen a pitch pipe?

Here's how it looks like:

An example of a pitch pipe. Photo Credits.

Yes. You can use that weird little thing to tune your guitar.

The first time I saw a pitch pipe, I never knew what it was meant for. I just stared at it for quite some time and I thought that maybe some kid must have left it there since its shape resembled a puzzle or lego piece. Out of curiosity, I grabbed it and took a closer look. When I saw the labels written on the pipes, I realized that it was some sort of a musical tool or something like a tuner.

Having fun tuning your guitar to a piano

Photo credits

Tuning your guitar to a piano is a pretty simple thing to do. A piano is a great tool because piano holds it pitch so well. Unlike guitars, a piano only needs to be tuned once or twice in a year.

Tuning to a Fixed Source

As I've said in my previous posts about relative tuning methods, tuning the guitar to itself has its limitations. The guitar will only sound great by itself but not when it is played with other instruments tuned to the standard pitches. The standard pitches are followed by all musical instruments in order to have uniform tuning rules and sound in harmony with one another.

Let me share with you my experience...

I was just a kid back then when I watched the movie "The wedding singer" which starred Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler on our VHS player together with my siblings. I really liked the movie especially the scene where Adam Sandler played the song "Grow old with you" inside the plane.

Proper hand movement when tuning your guitar

TIP: When you tune in the normal way, you use your left hand to turn the tuning peg. But after you remove your finger from the string that you’re fretting, it stops ringing; therefore, you can no longer hear the string you’re trying to tune to (the fretted string) as you adjust the open string. However, there’s a way to tune the open string while keeping your left-hand finger on the fretted string. Simply use your right hand! After you strike the two strings in succession (the fretted string and the open string), take your right hand and reach over your left hand (which remains stationary as you fret the string) and turn the tuning peg of the appropriate string until both strings sound exactly the same.

Relative Tuning: 7th-Fret Method

Aside from using the 5th-fret method to tune your guitar, you can actually use another relative tuning method which is called the 7th-fret method. The 7th-fret method derives its name from the fact that you tune your guitar in the said fret. But, instead of starting from the 6th string down to the 1st fret, you actually do it in reverse order.

Relative tuning

Photo Source

Among the different guitar tuning methods, relative tuning or the so-called "5th-Fret Method", is perhaps the most common and fundamental. If one string of your guitar is in tune, it's possible to tune the other strings in relation to it. That's why it is called relative tuning - being able to tune the guitar in relation to itself. Relative tuning is good because it is easy to get the guitar in tune.

How To Tune Your Guitar

Photo Source

Often, new guitarists will have a hard time tuning their guitar. Learning to listen to pitches very closely, then fine-tune them, is a skill that takes practice. One of the reasons why most new guitarists sound bad is because their instrument isn't in tune. Knowing how to tune your guitar is simply a MUST for guitarists.

Strings and Frets

Now that we know the different parts of a guitar and how they work together, we move on to our next topic which is all about tuning.

Guitars, unlike other musical instruments, require you to tune it first before you can actually start playing with it.You can actually distinguish newbies from seasoned guitar players by just simply listening to the tuning of his instrument. Seasoned guitarists are very particular when it comes to tuning and they always make sure that their guitar is in tune before they perform.

How guitars work

Now that we have already learned the different parts of the guitar, we move on to the next part which is understanding how those parts work together.

Photo source

String vibration and String Length

All musical instruments create sound by means of vibration. For wind instruments, the vibration derives from air passing over a mouthpiece, or from lips buzzing into a mouthpiece. For percussion instruments, the vibration comes from striking a surface made of canvas or metal. For string instruments, like guitars, the vibration comes from striking a string, which then vibrates. Of course, the strings would never vibrate if it were not given some sort of force or what we commonly know as tension. When a string is brought to a certain tension and then set in motion by a certain form of action like that of strumming or plucking, it produces a sound or a pitch. The different tones we hear from the strings of the guitar is simply achieved by tuning the strings to different tensions. The greater force or tension a string has, the higher the pitch it will produce.

The parts of a guitar

Hi there Guitarrista!

Today, we will be learning about the parts of a guitar. 

Birds, whether it's a dove, an owl, or an eagle, are considered birds because they share common characteristics like wings, beaks, have only two legs, and so much more. Just like birds, all guitars, no matter what type it is, also share their common physical characteristics that make them behave like guitars.

Guitars come in two basic types: Acoustic or Electric.

Start playing the guitar quickly

In continuation to my previous post, I would also assume that YOU WANT TO START PLAYING THE GUITAR QUICKLY!

Thus, this blog would try to do so without a lot of messing around with technical explanations about reading notes, time signature, clefs, and etc.. Although these kind of things can really help you a lot in moving on to the next level after you have mastered the basics, these aren't really necessary to play basic music.

Moreover, feel free to skip some topics that you already know and jump right to the one that you are looking for.