How To Tune A Guitar By Ear

How to tune a guitar by ear, should you find yourself in an apocalyptic situation where everybody hasn't got an electronic tuner and the apps on your phone doesn't work, so you can use your tuning app, you can do it this way. First thing you have to understand is how notes are ordered. I've drawn an excellent picture of a piano here to allow that to happen.

The short way about it is every note has a sharp after it, except for "E" and "B". So, I'll just show you on the piano here. The white notes on the piano are called natural notes.

They're not sharp or flat, they're just letter names. The white note in front of the group of two black notes is called a "C", so you go a C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. You'll notice there's a pattern in the black notes, groups of two and then groups of three.

This means, at some point, a black and white note do not alternate, and that occurs between an "E" and an "F", and a "B" and a "C". So, you can see, therefore, that we do not have an E# and we do not have a B#. This means that if you know the name of the notes that you're trying to tune to, you can find it on another string and tune it to that.

For example, here we have the "E" String. We're going to assume, whether it's true or not, the lowest string is tuned to an "E". Then we can climb up that string, one fret at a time, until we get to the note that says "A".

So, the first fret's an "F", second fret is F#, third fret's "G", fourth fret's G#, and at the fifth fret, we're getting an "A" and that will tell us how our next string is supposed to sound. So, then, we check it out and see if it's true. Now, you may think that sounds slightly different, and you'd be right, but what the difference is tundra, so this second string is thinner than this one.

And the way you can tell between tundra and pitch is if you were to hum those notes, so if you hum this "A", and then you try and hum this one, are you humming the same note? If you are, then it's in tune. I'll give you an example of when it's not in tune. So, here we are, in a plain white "A" again, I go up the five frets, E, F, F#, G, G#, A.

So, you're definitely not going to be humming the same note there, definitely going to have to go down to get that second note, don't I? Which means that it's going to have to come up to the "A", so here's the "A" again, and then I'm going to try and bring this note up to the "A". Then, you can play them together and see if they work well together, and they do, so that's in tune. So the next string we're looking at is a "D".

We need to know how we can find the pitch of a "D" is. We've established that the "A" is in tune, so now, we're going to go A, A#, B, C, C#, D. Once again, we're at the fifth fret.

So, the fifth fret on the "A" string is a "D". A, A#, B, C, C#, D. Again, the tundra's different, but the pitch is the same, and you carry this process along across the guitar.

At a certain point, you'll have to use the fourth fret of the "G" string as "G", G#, A, A#, B. So, here, I've got a diagrammatic representation of what's going on here. Fifth fret, fifth fret, fourth fret, fifth fret.

So, the fifth fret, on the "B" string is an "E" and that's telling you what the last string is supposed to sound like. Then, you can check it, because you've may have made a bit of error on your way across all those strings. You can check to see; this is "E"; matches all; rings well, with this "E", so I'm matching both "E's" now.

And that's how to tune a guitar. .