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.

 http://www.riffsnstrings.com/guitar_tips/tips_for_tuning_your_guitar.htm

Slide Guitar For Beginners

I’m not really an expert on slide guitar, so the following stuff is just for beginners. Slide guitar is an essential part of the Blues, I had to start with it. Duane Allman’s playing on “Layla and other assorted love songs” just blew me away, the same did EC unplugged. More than any other guitar technique it depends on the right feeling. The basics can be learned within a day, but to master it you need a long time.

Most slide guitar instructions start like “and now we use the open xyz tuning”. That means you can forget what you know about the fretboard and forget both your left and right hand techniques. You have to learn everything new. To avoid this, I’ll first explain slide guitar on standard tuning, so all you need is a slide. Open tunings (see below) give a different sound and have their advantages, but they are not better in every case. The late Muddy Waters for example played in standard tuning, also Duane and EC on some songs. Open tuning is often used for Delta Blues on acoustic guitars, because you need the bass strings in correct tuning. For soloing on electric guitars it’s not that important, so you can play in standard tuning. However, you have to damp some strings, which is usually done with the picking hand. That’s why most slide players prefer fingerstyle. Damping is more important in standard tuning, because you get dissonant intervals when the strings with all their overtones ring out.

The Guitar

You can use both acoustic and electric guitars, as long as they don’t have nylon strings. If you want to play much slide guitar, prepare a guitar just for this job. That means using heavier strings (no “super slinky”…) and a high action (distance of the strings to the fretboard). If you have an extra guitar only for slide, you can also try out the open tunings. If you have only one and play sometimes slide or want to switch between slide and normal playing, use the standard tuning.
Resonator guitars (i.e. a Dobro) are great for acoustic slide guitar, they give a loud, metallic “Delta Blues” tone due to the metal cones build in.

The advantage of slide guitar is that you can play it on old guitars with worn-out fretboards or even cheap guitars with bad adjusted frets. You don’t need the frets!

Back to Basics - Learn How To Play Guitar

So you want to learn how to play guitar do you? Well congratulations, because in my ever so humble opinion, learning to play the guitar is among the most rewarding things that you can learn. The goal of this article is not to turn you into some kind of overnight rock star, but rather to give you a bit of an introduction to the guitar, give you a couple chords to work on to get started.
But first… a question I come across all too frequently:

Can I Learn How To Play Guitar?

I had the good fortune of learning guitar when I was a teenager; however I’ve found that there are many people out there who are much further along in life, and are now wondering if it is even possible for them to learn at their age.
I’d like to answer that with a resounding YES!

YES! It is possible for you to learn to play guitar, regardless of your age. The oldest student of mine that I’ve heard from was 93… just starting to learn how to play guitar, and LOVING IT! The biggest