Tuning the Guitar Introduction

Tuning the guitar properly is the most important thing to learn when learning to play the guitar. If your guitar is out of tune nothing you play will sound good. I once heard an early bootleg tape of Van Halen and during the performance Eddies guitar got knocked out of tune. Even with a player of Eddie's caliber, things just sounded bad until the problem was corrected. I would suggest purchasing an electronic guitar tuner and learning how to use it. I also would strongly advise following these interactive guitar tuning lessons. Using these online guitar tuning lessons will help you train your ears for tuning.

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There are several different ways of tuning the guitar; of these I will show you two. On this page, for your convenience, I have provided a partial diagram of a guitar neck. If you click on the individual strings you will hear the sounds of the notes so you can tune your guitar to this lesson. On the next two pages, I will show you two different methods for tuning your guitar.

Tuning guitars by the standard tuning method is probably the easiest to learn but the less accurate of the two. Tuning by harmonics is more accurate, but it also takes more practice to master the technique. Also, visit Guitar Tuning Tips for more helpful advise for tuning your guitar.