Tuning

Description

Tuning is pretty easy, when you start out close to the right note. It's a lot more tricky, when for one reason or another you're way off the note and you don't know how to find your way back to the right letter name for a certain string. If you just started this course and you got lost in the tuning right off the bat, I'll try and help you back to the best of my abilities. And then in the next lesson we'll talk about how to handle this if you've already been through level 1 and learned the names of the notes.

So let's start in the least advanced end of the spectrum.

The first thing you have to do is to try to figure out if your string is too loose or too tight, and sometimes you can actually feel that.

The bottom 4 strings should feel somewhat similar when you tuck at them. I know they're different in thickness, but the tighter tension on the higher strings makes it so they're actually supposed to feel somewhat similar.

If I loosen my low E-string way down, you can feel how it's much looser then than the other strings. If your string feels lose you'll have to tighten it and carefully move your way up until it feels more like the other strings. But as always, be careful and make small adjustments at a time. And vice versa if it's way tighter than the other strings you'll have to carefully loosen it until you get closer.

The goal is just to get a little bit closer to the pitch we're going for, because it's much easier to hear what needs to happen when you get closer to the right pitch.

It's very common that this will happen with just one of your strings, and in that case you can use one of the strings that isn't way off to find your way back. Let's say for example that our E string is way off and we have no idea what's going on. The A string however is all good, so now we can use that for reference.

Now we'll use our trick from the previous lesson, where we know that the 5th fret of the low E string is supposed to be the same note as the open A string, so play that note followed by the open A string. Is it too low or too high?! If you can hear it you can start tuning carefully.

If you're not sure it it's too low or too high, try to first move up the neck to the higher notes and see if you can get closer to the pitch. If you find the matching note on this side of the 5th fret it means your low E string is too low and you have to tighten it to raise the pitch. The closer you get to the 5th fret the closer to home you'll be.

Now if you don't find the matching note by going up, try going down. Are you getting closer or further away? If you find the matching note down here on the lower side of the 5th fret, it means your low E string is to high and you need to loosen the string to lower the pitch.

Hopefully this will get you close enough that you can use your tuner or tune to my open string.