The Proper Way To Tune Your Guitar - Keeping Your Guitar In Tune

Many new guitarist and some advanced players have trouble playing and keeping their guitar in tune. Here I will list a few of the more common mistakes and how to solve them.

Once you have strung your guitar with new strings you must stretch them before tuning to pitch. I normally hold down the strings at the 24th fret with my left hand and use my right hand to pull the strings away from the body of the guitar. You don’t have to pull to hard a few good tugs will do. Tune to pitch and then stretch them one more time and tune up again.

When a guitar string goes out of tune it is always better to lower it below the desired pitch, give it a firm pull and then tune the string up to the correct pitch.

I recommend that you buy a good guitar tuner that runs on batteries or an adapter. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get a quality tuner that will stand up to some abuse while traveling to jam sessions and gigs. My personal favorites are a Korg tuner or Boss tuner; both Korg and Boss have affordable guitar tuners that work great.

Keep in mind that if your guitar is equipped with a tremolo bridge each string you tune will drop down in pitch as you tune up the adjacent string, therefore you should over tune your guitar. Over tuning your guitar simply means that you should tune your low E string up to an F this way by the time you are done tuning your guitar your low E string will drop down in pitch to an E. With a little bit of time you will get the feel for how much you should over tune each guitar sting until it become second nature.

I f you are playing in a band you should always tune your guitar to the same pitch. The standard pitch is A 440, but some guitarist like to tune down to 430 or even 420. A lot of Heavy Metal Bands tune down to get a heavier sound. The main point is that if you practice on a guitar that is tuned to 430 and then you play a gig with a band that tunes to A 440, every thing will sound very different, your singer may have problems hitting the notes that she or he did during practice, your solos will probably sound wrong, because everything is now a half step higher in pitch. To make thing easy on you pick a pitch that you like and stay with it when you practice and play at gigs.

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