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.

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.

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.