Tune a Guitar

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Tuning a guitar is one of the first things a guitarist learns after getting their first guitar. If your guitar is out of tune, no matter how well you play the guitar, it will always sound wrong.

There are several different methods to tune a guitar but all of them will involve you tuning your guitar strings to a particular tone or sound. Beginners should try out a few different methods to find out what works best for you. As you develop your ear you’ll likely develop your tuning technique as well and become much more accurate in your tuning.

Tuning to a Reference Pitch

Tuning to a reference pitch involves listening to another tone and tuning one of your guitar strings to match that tone. This method of tuning will require that you find another source for that tone like a tuning fork or a keyboard. But thanks to the Internet there are ton of tuners online you can use too:

Online tuners:

Tips for Tuning

When using tuners like the above you will need to match the tone of one of your guitar strings to the tone being sounded. At first this might seem like a tough task. Many beginners often have trouble telling whether the guitar string is higher or lower in pitch than the reference pitch.
One tip is to listen for waves or an oscillating sound between the two tones. You want to tune the string until the waves disappear and you have a single tone sounding when both the string and reference pitch are played together.

Tuning a Guitar to Itself

You may not always find yourself with a reference pitch. You can still tune your guitar but you if you try and play with other instruments you may find yourself out of tune. To tune guitar without a reference pitch you start at the top E string, fretted at the 5th fret and played in unison with the A string. The E string at the 5th fret is the same pitch as the open A string. You can then tune the other strings to using this same technique. See the diagram below to tune the other strings.

Electric Tuners

Electric Tuners are the easiest way to tune a guitar. Electric tuners will read the pitch our your guitar’s strings and provide a meter reading. You can then adjust the pitch of each string until it matches the correct pitch according to the tuner.