Tuning your Guitar by Ear for Beginners

Video Transcript

BRYAN BILLHIMER: Hi. I'm Bryan Billhimer and, on behalf of Expert Village, welcome to Guitar Playing 101, The Basics. Okay, so now we're going to talk about how to tune the guitar. There's a couple of different ways to do it. The easiest way is if you have an electric guitar tuner, but we're not always afforded that luxury so the other way is to tune by ear. The one thing with tuning by ear, though, is you need at least a reference for one string to make sure that one string is in tune. So you can do that with either a pitch pipe that you can buy from a music store or if you have a piano or a keyboard around the house that you can reference to. I've already tuned my A string to a piano so I know my A-string is in tune. So what we're going to do now is tune the rest of the strings to the A string that I already know is in tune. So you need to find an A on the low E string and tune that against your A string that you've already tuned. So I'm going to fret that right here on the 5th fret low E string is where you're A is. So I'm going to hit both strings and you can hear that they're out of tune, and what you should listen for is the two different waves. The two different waves beat against each other, and the farther out of tune that the two waves are, the faster that they'll beat against each other. You know you're getting closer in the tune as the beats get wider apart. You can hear the beats are getting wider apart and now they're gone--that's how you know you're in tune. So now we're going to repeat that process. We're going to tune the D string, so we're going to find the D on the A string, which is already in tune, so that's 5th fret again. Hit those two strings, listen for the beats. No beats; we know we're in tune. Next string, same thing, 5th fret. Now we're tuning the D--the G string. We still got a little bit of beat there. Sometimes you go too far; just take it back, and there we go.

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