How to Tune a Guitar

Series Summary

The guitar has been around for nearly 5,000 years, developed from even more ancient instruments akin to the sitar, it has been inspiring audiences since its first chord was strummed. It is the primary instrument involved with many genres of music including country, blues, flamenco, rock, and pop, and has been celebrated as one of the most expressive instruments in the world. Whether blending acoustic harmonies on a classical guitar or shredding solos on an electric guitar, the importance of the guitar to 20th century music cannot be ignored.

In this free video series, our expert Mike Lais will show you how to tune a guitar in several different tunings. Mike will show you the relative tuning method, the harmonic tuning method, and how to tune using electric tuners and tuning forks. Mike will also show you how to tune the guitar to several alternate tunings like drop d, open d, DADGAD, open g, and open c. Mike will even show you how to play in these alternate tunings.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lais. On behalf of Expert Village, we are going to go over some guitar tuning techniques. I can understand that when it comes to tuning your guitar, that this is probably one of the most frustrating spots of playing the guitar, where you think you have it in tune, and it's just not quite right when you go to strumming your chords. Well, some of the reasons that the guitar will go out of tune is that when you're playing a really nice solo and you have some big bends going on there, which I'll explain what those are later, but when you're doing something like this, something like that may knock your guitar out of tune. As well as things like driving and transporting your guitar, it will probably go out of tune because the weather will expand and contract the wood just as it does every other piece of wood that you can think of. So you want to double check your tuning when you're traveling, as well as breaking strings. That will change the tension on your fret board, on your neck of your guitar, which will knock some of the strings out of tune. So you just always want to be aware, and always be checking your tuning, and I'm going to give you some different techniques on how you can do that, as well as we're going to get into some fun and play in some alternate tunings that are not just the standard E, A, D, G, B, E tuning."