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.

Newer electronic tuners made especially for guitars can usually sense what string you’re playing, tell you what pitch you’re nearest (E, A, D, G, B, E), and indicate whether you’re too low (flat) or too high (sharp) of that note. Older versions of electronic tuners feature a button or a switch to select which string you want to tune.

An electronic guitar tuner clipped to an electric guitar. Photo Credits.

If you are using an electric guitar or an acoustic-electric guitar, you can simply plug your guitar into the electronic tuner. If your instrument is plainly acoustic, you can use the built-in microphone of the electronic tuner for tuning. These tools are inexpensive and usually powered by 9-volt or two AA batteries.

I don't have a electronic tuner gadget since I can easily tune my guitar by ear but I do have a mobile guitar tuner application installed on my mobile phone (Pocket PC) that I use whenever I want my instrument to be accurately tuned. It is called the Chromatic Guitar Tuner developed by 4pockets.

Chromatic Guitar Tuner by 4pockets

The Chromatic Guitar Tuner is a real time guitar tuner for your PC and Pocket PC. It can determine the frequency, musical note and octave for each of your guitar strings. The program incorporates harmonic error correction technology and the ability to compensate for notes played in the wrong octave, allowing you to tune using either open strings or harmonics. It also provides a built-in tone generator, the ability to transpose up and down by one to three semi-tones and a number of popular tuning standards.

If you don't want to buy and electronic tuner, you can simply search the Internet for guitar tuner applications that you can install on your mobile phone. Just be sure that it is compatible with your phone's operating system and version.

However, if you are very lazy to learn about these tuning stuff, you can ask a ROBOT to do it for you. Yes, a robot! I'm not kidding! Tunermatic was able to develop one and you just simply it over the tuning peg, pluck that string, and the Tunermatic robotic guitar tuner will AUTOMATICALLY turn the tuning peg and put the string in perfect pitch!

The TunerMatic robotic guitar tuner automatically turning the tuning pegs. Photo Credits

Cool huh!?!