How To Tune A Bass Guitar

Tuning the bass – here is how to tune your bass guitar in a post-apocalyptic situation where you haven't got access to an electric tuner and the amps on your phone have failed. So, here we have an excellent picture with diagrammatic representation of a piano. You got a natural note which is a C, followed by an accidental which is a C#, followed by a natural again, D, and followed by an accidental D#, then you've got a natural E, and look, no black note in between.

Go straight to F, so there's no E#. This system follows on until you get to B again where there is no black note, so there's no B#. So, to try and see that, you could say that every note has a # after it, except for B and E.

This is helpful for you in the following way. If you know the name of the string that you're trying to tune to, for example, if you know that you're supposed to tune an A string, if you can find the note A on another string, you can tune to that. And here's how that works on the bass.

The lowest string is an E; we're going to assume that's correct, even if it's not. Now, I'm going to tune my next string along to that E in the following way: E, F, F#, G, G#, A, and I know now that's an E. So, my next string should stand just like that.

You may think that sounds slightly different and you'll be right. But the difference is the timbre. This string is thicker than this string, so it will have a slightly different timbre.

What's not different is its pitch, and you can find out what the pitch is by humming the note. You can play the next string along now and hum that one. If you find that you're humming the same note, listen to it.

What I'm going to do now is de-tune that, and then we can see what the difference would be. So now once again, I'm playing the A on the E string, and I'll play the next string which is supposed to be an A. If I try to hum that, I'm definitely humming something different.

I have to go down, so that means it's got to come back up. So, I'm going to hear the original A again. You have a banging tune again.

This system goes across the bass. So now, I've got my A string in tune. I know the next string is called a D, so I'm going to find a D on the A string, and that's to be found on the fifth fret again.

A, A#, B, C, C#, D - once I've got that one in tune, I'll do it again for the next string. So it's D, D#, E, F, F#, G - that was it. And then, you can check these things as well, so I know that this is a D string, so the second fret will be an A, so I've got D, D#, A, and this is an E, so not too lower, but this is an E.

So, I've got the three as well to play together. Yeah, they do. But if they didn't, that would be out of tune, and I'll have to look at it again.

We have the E string - all the way E, F, F#, G, G#, A, that's with the fifth fret. So, that told us what the next string, the A string, is supposed to sound like. Once I've got that in tune, I'll do the same again to find out what was the D is supposed to sound like - A, A#, D, C, C#, D.

Here's my D there. It's telling me what the next string is supposed to sound like. Once again, we do that again for the D to form a G - so again, D, D#, E, F, F#, G and then I'll check G by playing the lower end string, and I found an E here - D, D#, E and I made sure that those both sounded good together.

If they didn't, I'll have to start again. That's how to tune your bass guitar! .