How To Tune An Acoustic Guitar

Hello. My name is Matthew Forbes from the Music Workshop Company. I'm going to take you through how to tune some instruments, how to play them basically and also how to read the noted music for them.

Here is how to tune an acoustic guitar. In the regular tuning, anyway, the strings are tuned from bottom to top -E-A-D-B and E. The intervals, if you don't get too technical, are all perfect fourths apart from the one between G and B, but we'll get on to that one in a minute.

The best way of tuning is probably using the frets trusting that the frets are in tune with themselves. Finding the lowest note, the E, if you have a piano, it's the E two below the middle C. This piano is slightly sharp.

And it's always these machine heads at the top that tune the strings. I turn them anti-clockwise to make them flatter and clockwise to go sharper. The fifth fret on that string, once I'm happy with it, is the same pitch as the string above.

So, if the string doesn't match it, trial and error until it does. If you prefer just to do it by ear and just to hear the interval, the best way of thinking of it is with the tonic solfa scale where you start with DO and you go up to FA. Do - re - mi - fa.

And it's always a good idea to sing the notes in your head before you match the sound of the string to it. Do - re - mi - fa. A little low.

If you need a song to it rather than the scale, it's the opening two notes of Auld Lang Syne, should be an old acquaintance, if that helps, we check it with the fifth fret. Pretty close. Do one more.

Trust the fifth fret on this one. Do - re - mi - fa. Now, between the G, that's this one, and the B is not a perfect fourth, it's a semi-tone less than that which is a major third.

So, we don't use the fifth fret, we use the fourth. There, we match that if we can. I like to think of the major third as the ambulance siren sound, if you need an association.

And then from the B to the E at the top, we're back to the fourths again. So, we go back to the fifth fret pretty much. That's a guitar in tune.

Tweak it a little bit. There are other acoustic guitar tunings, of course. The most popular alternative to this regular one is the drop D where the only thing that happens is the bottom E goes down to a D, so we end up with that lovely D sound.

Other tunings include the Dad Gad because of the D-A-D G-A-D where we bring the B down to an A and the top E. Sort of open tuning. There are many alternatives, but the regular one at the start of this video is the most popular. .