Harmonic 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. Here we're going to talk about the harmonic tuning method, which this one you may want to use later on, once you get a little bit more comfortable with your guitar, but you are going to have an easier time getting your guitar in tune. But it involves with you playing what are called "harmonics" on the guitar which, to get the sound of the harmonic, you want to place your finger on the string but not pressing it down. As you can see from here, that the string is not being pressed against the fingerboard as you would a regular note, but I'm just kind of resting my finger along the string just like so. And then, to get the harmonic sound, I want to strum the guitar, or pluck the string, and pull off my finger of the guitar at the same time, like that, whereas if this string were to ring by itself, that's what it sounds like. But we want to get the harmonic. And now the 5th fret of a string and the 7th fret of the string higher than it, or smaller than it, they are, in theory, supposed to have the same ring. And so we're going to check that between our "E" or our 6th string, and our "A" string or our 5th string. We're going to do that, we're going to put a harmonic on the 5th fret and the 7th fret, it's supposed to be the same. And if it was a little bit out, let's just put it a little bit out just for demonstration, you're going to be able to hear the wave of the harmonic a lot better than you would do the relative tuning method. As you can hear, it kind of, it sounds like it's bouncing, and then you just tune it to get rid of it. If you go above it, it's going to start it again, see? So we want that to go away. Remember, I'm always tuning from the bottom up. That sounds pretty good. So now we're just going to repeat that process for the next strings. Now to get this string that you had to go down to the 4th fret before, an easier way to do that is just to find another harmonic, so if I take the 7th fret of the lower string, that's going to be the same note as the 12th fret of the 2nd string. There's going to be a 5th apart, so you can just tune it that way. And that's harmonic tuning."