I have met many musicians who were otherwise very good performers, thoughtful songwriters, and great band leaders who none the less really weren’t that great at tuning their guitars. I guess that it is no surprise since most people first learn how to tune their guitars in the comfort and quiet of their own home, but once they are thrown into a live playing situation, then all kinds of other issues with sound sometimes get in the way of setting up a good sounding instrument. If this is your first time tuning a guitar or have been doing it a while, we’ll go over some things to keep in mind for tuning your guitar.

TUNING YOUR GUITAR… with a guitar tuner

The easiest way to tune a guitar, and probably the most common among people just starting out is to buy a guitar tuner and plug it in and follow the blinking lights to perfect in-tune-ness. If you have an electric guitar, or using the tuners built in mic if you have an acoustic guitar.

1. Turn on your tuner, and plug it into your electric guitar and turn up the volume knobs on the guitar itself. … Or hold the built in mic near the soundhole of your acoustic guitar.
2. Pluck any string with a sense of authority to ensure a strong signal for the tuner to pick up. (However don’t pluck too hard where the string itself vibrates too much and distorts or sounds bad.
3. ***IMPORTANT TIP*** Grab a hold of the tuning pegs with your other hand and *DETUNE* the string slightly. In other words, make the string “looser”, or make the note go “flat”. Then slowly turn the tuning peg to tighten the string until the tuner reads in tune. The reason for this is because you want to avoid the string “slipping out of tune” through vibration of playing the instrument…
4. Skip around to the other strings and repeat this process. You will most likely need to re-do strings you have already tuned, but as you tighten and change the tension on each string, you change the tension on the guitar neck itself, and that slightly changes the tension on each string, which makes it necessary to re-do tunings on each string. When you are doing the fine tuning, it isn’t necessary to “DETUNE” as much. But I always do anyways.
5. Sturm a chord and write a song, you’re done.

I’m not sure of the actual physics of why you need to detune a string to keep it in solid tune, but I imagine that since the string is under tension, if you unwind the tuning peg to loosen the string, the guitar string itself could bind at different points around the tuning peg itself,(or the nut, or the bridge), and later slip causing the string to loosen further and send you out of tune once you start playing. If anyone has a more scientific explanation, please leave a comment below.

But there are other issues to take into account that affect the tuning of the guitar that are important to how it sounds.

STRING TENSION

Depending on how new the guitar strings are, you might want to break them in before you stat tuning. You’ll need to stretch them out a little just to get them more flexible. Again, the idea is that you’d want to stretch out the strings so they are less likely to bind while you are tuning them. Same goes for strings that are too old which are too stretchy and won’t be able to hold a tuning.

FRET INTONATION

You can do everything right, but once you start playing a chord it all sounds out of whack. That might be an issue and a problem with intonation. That is, you can spend your time tuning the “open” strings, but once you put your finger on a fret, if the intonation is off, then you have to take a step back and set up the guitar better.

Here is a good link on the web to learn more about How to Tune your guitar.

http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org/

And if you click on each of the letters on the “tuner widget” below, you can hear what it is supposed to sound like….