If you recently had owned a guitar after that previous lessons that I taught you, or you previously have one before you had the chance to read this tutorials, and you wanted to learn the most important fundamental about the guitar. Yes, you heard me right that this is the most needed skill or knowledge to gain your status as the guitar god if you prefer it or the better player in your neighborhood. Honestly, you can’t learn this stuff so instantly or easily in just a nick of time. This can take time and you need to gain and play more and more in order to memorize the sound (as far as my experience and this Guitar tutorials for beginners is concerned) of a standard tuning.
I have seen many guitar players who reached as a good player in the guitar but, don’t know how to tune it right. Yep, this happens to some or maybe most of the time when they just borrow the guitar or asking somebody to tune the guitar for them. Now, that is some kind of attaining anything if you don’t know how to tune it. So, be serious about this stuff because this will help build you to be the best in this craft. Master the art of tuning a guitar and surely, you will see the difference if you mastered this thing and play your favorite songs in a very smooth sound coming from your guitar.
What do I need to do?
First, you must know what a fret is. If you do, then great if you had read my previous lesson and we can now start this thing on. If no, you can see my first lesson about guitar parts, and you’ll see what I’m talking here about in order for you to follow this lesson quickly.
Second, you must learn what the open string hit chords of a guitar are and what the chord is all about. We will need this very often so you must understand this in this lesson for your convenience. This is the core of this lesson, a chord for each string in a guitar without a doing any chords using your finger.
Third, the numbers representing the strings is another thing to consider here in this lesson. If you don’t know the numbers of any string will give you a very big problem in the future so you must also focus on this one.
And lastly, memorize the tune of each guitar chord sound in a specific open string hit as we do the tuning. The principal idea why we are doing these things is for you to make your guitar in the right tune all the times whenever you want to play it.
The Fifth fret is the division and the standard tuning.
Now, you know what the fret is, this will be easier for you to do. A guitar has a 24 fret count in it. But, some had less been depending upon the brand, style, and quality you had bought or had. This is not important for now cause we are just in a beginners stage so were not needing all of those 24 frets to satisfy this lesson for you to learn how to tune. Here Guitar tutorials for beginners we will be concentrating in the fifth fret and also fourth fret in this lesson. The sixth frets up to the last will be ignored so you won’t be confused. Our goal is for you to realize the fret counts that we will be making in this lesson. We will be counting frets from the 1st up to the fifth fret. We will be using a standard tune in this lesson because it is the generic tune for all the songs you can hear.So, how do I start? To tune our guitars in the standard tune, we need to put our finger in the fifth fret by putting your finger in the first fret and slide it down going to the body of the guitar until you reached the fifth division or fret of the fret board(off course!) . This is the thing you need to remember, when you tune your guitar to this particular tune, always in this fret. There are a lot of tunings concerning this, for example: when you move two frets down to the seventh fret, and you tuned it there, you will be making the tune of drop D. A standard tuning that we will be doing is called open E tuning. But, experts called it as the “standard tuning”. When you play with an accompaniment instrument such as a piano their tuning is in open E all the time so this is the generic tune for the guitar. Other types of tunes were used mostly for rock music or more, specifically metal music.
Now, you know where the fifth fret is! That’s the first step to do this. So we will now move on to our next pit stop here at Guitar tutorials for the beginner. This is pretty easy to do right?
The open string hit chords
Now, I know that this is kind of confusing for you to understand. What is an open string hit chords that I am talking about? And what is a chord?
A chord is a collection of string or a string that you press using your fingers in the fret board or inside a specific frets. In doing so, you can create a chord with it. This is the note for any musical instruments including guitars off course. This is essential in playing a song and all the songs will not be made without this too. But, you can also create a chord for this instrument by just simply hitting the string with pressing any of the strings in the fret board and this is called the open string hit chords that we will use in this tutorial about tuning this instrument.
The open string hit chords are not specifically used just for tuning. This particular technique has lots of uses, mostly on a song using a pluck (usually love songs and folk songs) instead of a strum. And you can also use this, if you are making a lead gain in a specific song or score. But, as I said earlier, we will be using this technique to tune our precious guitar to make it sound smooth.
Numbers for strings
Now that you know the fret and the chords that you needed to make this lesson a reality. You need to learn how to the read tablature. This is a very technical stuff for a guitar player. In order for you to know how to tune the instrument, you must know the numbers that represent the string. Besides, when you buy a new string for it, you need to know what a string number has been broken so that the store keeper would know what string you need to buy and not the wrong one. Here the numbers that represent the string:
6 - The thickest string and is in the top position of the entire sting in the fret board.
5 - The preceding string from the top and the second thickest string of all.
4 - The preceding string from the second thickest string.
3 – The fourth string to be the fourth thickest and the preceding string to the fourth one.
2 – The fifth string from the top position and is the second thinnest string in the fret board.
1 – The thinnest string in the fret board. This string is positioned in the bottom the fret board.
Now, as you can see, the first 3 string coming from the top if you had a steel set of string. You will see these strings covered with copper and the other three has no copper in it. If you had a nylon set of string then you will probably see the first three having a dark or bold color rather than in the remaining three who has a plain color only. You may ask why? This is because, the first three strings from the top are called the bass part of the instrument and the remaining three is called the lead part. This is a more complex topic for you as beginners. So, again we will be leaving it as that cause will be discussing this thing further in the future.
In addition to this, each string has a corresponding chord in it or its position represented a chord to you hit a string without pressing it in the fret board as I had mentioned early in this lesson. The chord representation for these strings was:
6 - The Chord E
5 - The Chord A
4 - The Chord D
3 - The Chord G
2 - The Chord B
1 - The Chord Lower e
That was the chord representation of each chord and this chord representation is a standard tune. In the future, you will learn those things that you had encountered here that I had included or explained in this tutorial. Now, we move on to the main topic of this while the agenda.
Tuning the guitar for the first time
Now, we will apply of the things that I had mentioned earlier. This is the main goal of this thing that I had been mentioning to you from the start of this whole thing. We will now tune the guitar in the standard tune and finish this whole course and you can now move on to the next levels for these stuffs.
So, how do we tune a guitar? It’s simple! All you have to do is to press down the string number six and place it in the fifth fret as I said earlier using your fingers (off course!) and simply hit with your finger from your other hand. In doing so, hit the preceding string (string number 5) and compare the sound of the two strings that they produce. In this process, you’re actually tuning the string 5 to string 6 and copy its sound when they sounded equally the same go on to the next string. Do the routine for the remaining string except for the string 2 when tuning this you need to make your finger go up one fret (fourth fret), and you will do the routine just like from the other strings. The only difference is the fret. That is the process on how you tune a guitar, comparing two stings sounds from top to bottom. Sounds complicated, right? Consider these things:
How do you say that I am doing this thing correctly? Am I tuning it right? When do I stop?
In order for you to know that you are tuning the guitar right. You must know the sound of a standard tuning. How do you do that? You can use a piano and hit the e note or the e chord there. The number 6 string is a chord e right? So, you need to make the e string from the guitar and the e chord in the piano sound alike. That’s it. When you copied the sound coming from the piano, you made your string number 6 in the chord e. So, when you hit the string it will produce an open string hit chord of e. Do these in all the remaining strings when you had done it to all of it then that is the time to stop doing this thing.
I don’t have a piano, is there another to tune it?
Yes, there is another way, and actually it has lots of alternatives in doing this. If you had a very good ear (good listening skills in memorizing a sound) you can go to search Google for a tune of a chord in the string 6. Actually, in tuning a guitar the most important string you will tune is the string number 6 cause the rest is depending on the tune of this string. So, if you memorized the tune of the open string e chord you don’t need a piano and do the routine, or you can use gadgets and software for it. You can find these stuffs in Google too. In my days as a beginner I used software called Guitar pro. This thing is a very powerful stuff to consider and this will make you learn faster.
This lesson here at Guitar tutorials for beginners, on tuning a guitar has now been finished! Hope you liked the tutorial that I had made for you. Upcoming tutorials will be out soon that will try to help you to be a better guitar player. Playing a guitar and how to be a good player has a long process, so be patient my friend and look at the bright side it will give you. I know that this part of the tutorial will most likely be hard for you but, if you really like to reach your goal then go and try a little mote harder, and you will see the results for yourself.
