How to Tune a Guitar by Ear

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Derek Tarnow. I've been playing guitar for twelve years, and I'm going to show you how to tune a guitar with your ear. There are several different ways of doing this, one is just by, what they call relative tuning which could be considered all tuning guitar by ear, is relative tuning because you're tuning the guitar in relation to itself. If you needed to get like a note from someone else in your band or whatever, if you have like an acoustic piano, chances are it's not going to be exactly in tune to what your tuner would be in tune to, so you might have to tune by using this. So you get a note from them, but for our purposes we'll just assume that your E string is in tune with the piano or the other instruments that can't re-tune like we can. So, this is your E note, on the fifth fret is your A, and that is same A as your open A string. You can tell that my A string is quite a bit low, so what you do in this method is you tune up the string to where it sounds the same. And this does take some practice to get - to train your ear to really recognize the tones as being the same, so a good way to do that is if you do have an electronic tuner, a good thing to do is to tune the strings and then check yourself, and then take it from there. Another way to tune by ear is by using harmonics. Use the fifth fret harmonic and the seventh fret harmonic for your E string and A string tuning, which I just tuned. My E string was flat as well. And now they're in tune, and you can do the same pattern for these, for your G, your D to G string tuning. You can always check like that, and a lot of people will check with octaves as well, so open E, this is your E, open A, this is an A, and for your B and E strings, what I like to do is to tune here on the ninth fret, this harmonic makes a B. You can tune that, chord is right, and you use the ninth fret harmonic for tuning your E as well. And then you play a couple chords to check your tune, so let's try a G. I find G to be a good one because it has a lot of open strings, and it just has a really open sound, it's really easy to recognize if it's out of tune. E is also a good one, but G is the one I tend to go by."