Standard Western Guitar Tuning

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lais. On behalf of Expert Village, today we are going to be talking about getting familiar with the guitar. Now that you have the basic technique's down, it's time to get our guitar in tune. The first thing that we want to do is get a starting note. They way you're going to do that is with watching this video at least if you have nothing else to do or nothing else to give you a reference pitch. We're going to take my A because I've already taken the liberty of tuning it just for you. Basically, what you want to do is take the A, which is the fifth string, second from the top or the fifth up from the bottom. Take that and try to match it to mine. There's the note. Play it as many times as you want to get the note correctly. Now that we have the A in tune we're going to take the rest of the guitar and make that be in tune with that A. The easiest way to do that is to count up to your fifth fret which is going to be right here. On most guitars you have little dots marking certain frets. The third is where the first dot will be, and then the fifth fret is where the second dot will be. We want to go up to the fifth fret of each string and put it in tune with the string above it. So, to tune my E I want to get this string, the sixth string, which is going to be tuned to an E note, we want this to be in tune with the A. To make that happen you just want to place your finger on the fifth fret and then strum your fifth sting, or your A string. They should match up. This one, this string sounds a little bit sharp right here. So what I want to do is I'm going to take it, I'm going to drop it below the pitch because you always want to go up in the guitar. You never want to tune down. The reason for that is that the nut is going to catch your strings and if you're tuning from above the note and going down your tendency is going be is going to catch and it's going to drop after you tune your note. So, you want to tune up so the nut catches it in the appropriate spot. Now, I'm below it so I'm going to bring it up. That sounds pretty good. You want to continue this process for the rest of the guitar. We're going to go up and tune the D which is also the fourth string. I'm going to place my finger on the fifth fret of the A, or the fifth string, and play it with the fourth string. That one there sounds pretty good so we don't really have to make any adjustments. We're going to continue on to do the next so you play the fourth with the third. This one sounds a little but sharp to me, so you're going to bring it down below it and then I'm going to go up. Another thing that you want to listen for is little vibrations. If the note is slightly out of tune it's going to have a little bit of a wave to it and you don't want that to happen. The best thing you want to do is just to kind of make that go away. Just like that. For us tuning the second string we got to go to the fourth fret of the third string because it's tuned a little bit differently, not too much. But, it's the same concept; I'm going to bring it up in tune. To tune the final string, we're going to go up to the fifth fret again and play it with the E. It's the same process as everything else; go below it and come up. Now you should have your guitar in perfect harmony."