Hey, How you doing? Justin here to show you how to get your guitar in tune.
Now, if you're already confident that your guitar is in tune,
you know exactly all about all this, you know how to use your tuner,
than feel free to move on to the next lesson in my Beginners Course.
For those of you who are not really sure,
a bit new to this or want a little refresher,
there are quite a few different ways to tune your guitar.
When I grew up It was pitch pipes. It's like a little kind of a harmonica
with six things that you could blow and it gave you the note
and you had to tune your guitar up.
Electronic tuners made that a hell of a lot easier,
which you can still buy like stand-alone little, you know, guitar tuners.
You can also use apps.
Most of the time I tend to either use an app or a clip-on tuner.
Now, clip-on tuners literally just clip onto the headstock of your guitar,
you don't need to be plugged in, you don't need any sort of amplification,
and they give you all of the information that you need to tune your guitar
and they're relatively cheap.
So, actually what I recommend is using a clip-on tuner.
So I got two clip-on tuners here to demonstrate today.
The first one is a TC Electronic PolyTune,
which can actually tune all six strings at the same time.
It will show you which one is out of tune.
It's a very, very accurate tuner. It's the one a use nearly all the time.
I think it's great. Little bit on the expensive side maybe for a beginner,
but you will last a long time with this tuner.
You'll probably not gonna need another tuner anytime soon.
Also, very very small, compact. I like that sort of stuff.
I would normally have them around the back of the guitar by the way, no the front.
I've just stuck tem at the front here to make it easier for me to filme it.
As well as that tuner I went and bought myself
what I think is probably the most common budget tuner.
It's called a Snark. Very, very common tuner.
Reasonably accurate, easy to use. All of that sort of stuff.
So what I thought I'd do is just take you through actually what they look like
and how to use the tuners.
Now... most commonly when you get a guitar,
especially if it's straight out of the box, strings will all be detuned a bit.
So I'm just gonna knock my string varying amount set of tune here
so we can work on getting it back in tune.
So let's start by tuning the thinner string here.
So I'm gonna play it first of all. It's saying it's the note D.
The thinner string needs to be the note E.
Now, E is after D, so we have to go up.
Most times you're gonna find that you tune up to a note.
Particularly if you got a new guitar. The strings would have gone flat over time.
So, now I'm just looking here.
On this one, on the Snark, I'm looking for the blue line at the top.
With a little, it's a got a little bit of a green edge to it as well.
On this one, I want the little center thing to be green, not going onto the red,
and this line in the middle to be relatively stable.
A bit difficult to get it exactly stable I think but...
There we go! It's got the E string in tune.
Now, if we look at the second string, this needs to be the note B.
At the moment it's the note A.
So we just keep going up.
It's showing A#. Now here we go, we're on the B.
You can still see it needs to go up.
There we go. We're accurately on the B.
There we go! That's pretty good for the B!
Ok, this one is showing the note F#.
So that's far to go here.
There we go! That's pretty good. That was the note G. Just the third thinner string.
Fourth string. This one is showing a C#.
Just tuning it up.
You always wanna tune up to a note too, not down.
So if I went to far... "Oh oops, it's gotta be D", I would actually go lower
and then back up.
I think getting into the habit of always tuning up to a note is a really good idea.
There we go!
This one ... Oh! This one went right down. That's an F#.
This one needs to be an A. The fifth string.
Keep going up here to the note A... Here we go! You don't wanna do it too far, see?
Or you'll miss the right note.
There we go! There's an A. That's pretty good!
To D, D#... We're looking for E again.
Two outside strings on the guitar are both E's.
So, there are a couple of common problems that beginners face
when they are learning to tune their guitar.
Using a tuner only really works when the guitar is roughly in tune.
If it's really, really out of tune,
like, you had to replace a string
or you got a guitar out of a friend's loft
and it's been there for a couple years or whatever. It's really out.
You're gonna have to do a little bit of listening first, OK?
You're gonna have to put a string on -
if you don't know how to change your strings,
there's lessons on that on the website,
as well there'll be a link to that in the description as well -.
You're gonna have to listen and put, you know,
get the string attached correctly and... Listen.
And again, in the Tune Your Guitar series on the website,
there's loads of different ways of tuning guitar.Not just using a tuner.
So, you wanna, for that...
in that circumstance, if the strings are really way out,
then you wanna use your ear as well. Perhaps, before a tuner.
And get them roughly in tune. You're gonna have to listen to roughly how high or low
the notes are of each individual string.
Another common problem beginners face
is finding it difficult to play just one string at a time.
Nearly all tuners wanna hear just one string at a time
when you're doing your tuning.
So, if you've never used a pick before it's a whole new thing.
You gotta try and pick this fourth string here.
It's gonna be fairly difficult. I know because I've tried it left-handed, right?
Difficult to get just one string ringing out.
The best solution to do away with the pick all together and just use your thumb.
So, let's say you wanna tune this fifth string.
You're gonna rest your thumb on the fifth string there,
and then you're going to strum, like, push down with the thumb
and live the thumb resting on the string beneath it.
OK? Technically, this is called a "rest stroking" in classical guitar,
but doesn't really matter.
It'll just help to keep it nice and quiet
and give you a nice, kind of, the correct technique
if you think about resting the thumb on the string below.
Before you go to the next string, just mute it.
And there you go onto the next string.
It doesn't really matter whether you start with a thicker string
or you start with a thinner string,
but if your guitar was very out of tune
and you had to tune them all up or down a lot,
then you might find you need to tune your guitar twice.
Because actually the neck moves backwards and forwards a little bit
relative to the tension of the strings.
So if you changed the tension of the strings considerably,
the neck might have moved just a little bit.
Usually, a second tune will sort that out no problem.
If you're all concerned about any of this stuff,
I would urge you to go and check out my module on how to tune your guitar,
because there's loads of different approaches that you can use.
You can use a pedal, you can use apps, you can use a harmonica,
you can tune to a piano,
you can tune the guitar to itself if you're at a campfire
and you got nothing to tune and no tuner.
OK? There are lots of different ways to do it and what wanna do
is learn a couple of ways and the settle on the one that suits you best.