Relative Guitar Tuning Method

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lais. On behalf of Expert Village, we are going to go over some guitar tuning techniques. Ooh man, that sounds good to me! Anyway, we're going to show you how to fix that on this segment of the film, and what we're going to do is we're going to start with a technique of tuning the guitar called "relative tuning". And what you need for this is you're going to need a reference pitch, which most often people use in "A", which, in the guitar case, is the 5th string, that one right there. So now that we have that, and I know that that one's in because I checked it, but you might want to check that with a piano or with another instrument that you're playing with. Just have them give you an "A" so you have a reference pitches so you can move on and get your guitar in tune. So now with this way of tuning, we're just going to start by taking the 5th fret of all the strings and making it so that you can just match up the notes because this is, in theory, supposed to be the same as your 5th string, just like that. Now this one is actually pretty close, but we're just going to move it up just a hair. Keep in mind when you're tuning your guitar, you always want to start below the pitch, you want to start below it just like that, and come up to it. And this is because you have a thing here called the "nut", which is going to hold your strings and it's going to essentially kind of grab onto the string so that if you're going down to the pitch, if you're going this way to the note, it's going to grab it and then when you start playing it's going to shift a little bit keeping your guitar out of tune ever so slightly. But when you go up, the tension is not going to change because you're tightening this area of the guitar so it's going to stay in tune more. So, again, we're going to find this note here, the 5th fret of the 6th string, and we're going to match it up to the 5th string of the guitar. That sounds pretty good. We're going to repeat this process on the next two strings, so the 5th fret of the 5th string should sound like the open 4th string. Again I'm going up because it sounded a little bit below the pitch, or which we call "flat". Here I went above it a little bit, so I'm going to drop way below it and come up. Now we're going to repeat this process on the next two strings, for the 4th and the 3rd. I'm a little bit below it, come up, sound good. So now, for the next strings, we're going to want to take the 4th fret of the 3rd string to match it up with the 2nd string. This is just so that you have your guitar in a tune in to where all your patterns will fit in. So that's the note we want to match, here we're a little bit above it so I'm going to want to drop down, there we go, that sounds like a good match. And now we're going to go back up to the 5th fret of the 2nd string and match that with the 1st string. There, that sounds pretty good, and a good way to check your tuning is if you just strum one of the chords. And we sound good! And that is "relative tuning"."