For a beginning guitar player, probably the most important thing he should be able to do is to make sure that his instrument is in tune. The most precise way and by far the easiest way to tune a guitar is to use a guitar tuner, you plug in your guitar hit the string to tune and watch the LED lights (follow you tuners manual, mine got LEDs) hit center for the note you are tuning. Its really easy.

If you dont have a tuner thats where Guitar Basics for Beginners | Tuning Your Guitar comes in. Lets get on to it!

Im going to teach you how to tune your guitar without a tuner, Ive seen others do it some other way (forming chords and testing how rightthey sound together, well, it was something like that), but this is the most basic and what works for me and the easiest to understand.

The fattest string on your guitar is called the 6th string or the Low E string because when played open, on standard tuning, should produce the E note. We will need a reference note from a tuning fork, a pitch pipe or other instrument thats in tune. All you do is turn the tuning peg until the note on the guitar sounds like the E note that youve just played. Once you have that first note you proceed in an orderly manner tuning one string after another. Press down on the 5th fret of the 6th string, then play the 5th string open. The 6th string with the 5th fret pressed down is the same note as the 5th string played open. Turn the tuning peg until the 5th string sounds like the 6th string with the 5th fret depressed.

its a recurring patter, next you press down the 5th fret on the 5th string...then play the 4th string open. Once again, tune until these two notes sound the same. Then move onto the next string...Press down on the 5th fret of the 4th string and tune the 3rd string to this note. Once you get to the third string there is a different pattern...you press down on the 4th fret of the 3rd string and then tune the 2nd string to this note. And lastly you press down the 5th fret of the 2nd string and tune the open 1st string to this note.

There you go, a tuned guitar, oh and by the way, The 6th string doenst have to be tuned in E note, but you can tune the other strings in reference to it so as to be in tune with itself, but you would need to tune it to the E if you wanted to play along instruments that are in standard tuning.

This is referred to as standard tuning [E A D G B E] and quite popular, this is not the only way to tune your guitar though. You There are variey of ways to tune the guitar, but for the beginner this is the tuning that I will suggest to start with.

Thank you for reading my article Guitar Tuning | Guitar Basic for Beginners!