Hopefully, you’ve managed to tune your guitar using the online guitar tuner, but let’s look at some other tuning methods…

From the diagram below, there are twelve frets. Notice how each string has the same note on both the open fret (0) and twelth fret (12); they are said to be an octave apart.

Octave is the interval between one musical pitch and another with half or double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon which has been referred to as the “basic miracle of music”.

The purpose of standard tuning, is to provide simple fingering for many chords and be able to play common scales with minimal left hand movement. The notes for standard tuning are seperated by a five-semitone interval (semitone is also called a half step or a half tone and is the smallest musical interval). This basic five-step interval allows notes of the chromatic scale to be played with each of the four fingers of the left hand controlling one of the first four frets (index finger on fret 1 and little finger on fret 4, for example).

Tuning with harmonics

When you play any note on a guitar, you are not playing one note, but a whole family of notes at the same time – called harmonics. It is the brain that makes it sound like one note. Tuning or even playing your guitar using harmonics, can be difficult because it requires a good ear and soft finger technique, so feel free to skip the following, it’s added only for completeness.

If you gently touch a string over the actual metal fret (don’t press it down, just touch it) at certain positions on the fretboard, you’re reducing the number of harmonics to one and if done right, you can hear a slight ‘pulsing’ as the note sounds. If the string is tensioned correctly (tuned), you’ll be able to feel and hear the note reverberate through the guitar. You can then accurately compare strings by playing each one at certain position and hearing the pulsing to see if they’re in phase.

Follow the fingering below and if both notes are precisely the same, you will hear them as one homogeneous sound. If they aren’t, they will produce a phasing, tremolo-like sound that vibrates even more if those notes are out of tune. Just bring that phasing to a standstill, and they’re tuned. It works for every pair of strings apart from tuning the ‘B’ to ‘G’ and provides a very accurate method of tuning relatively.

Different tunings

There are other ways to tune a guitar. If you’re playing folk music or Rolling Stones tunes you’ll probably find ‘Open G’ tuning useful:

• 6th (thickest) string: D
• 5th string: G
• 4th string: D
• 3rd string: G
• 2nd string: B
• 1st string: D

If you’re playing ‘Grunge’ rock you might find a ‘Drop D’ tuning useful. It’s simpler than it sounds: you just tune the bottom (thickest) E string down a tone so it plays a ‘D’ when open. You can then play a power chord by barring the bottom three strings. Rockin’ riffs will fall from your fingers.

There is also the ‘Open D’ tuning, which is a great place to start mucking about with open tunings:

• 6th (thickest) string: D
• 5th string: A
• 4th string: D
• 3rd string: F#
• 2nd string: A
• 1st string: D

There are many more. You can experiment with different tunings as much as you like, but be careful not to tune too high and snap a string.