The importance of tuning your guitar

Oh man, there is nothing worse than an out of tune guitar.

Oh no, there is… It’s someone playing an out of tune guitar.

I can hear when a guitar is not tuned up from a mile away, and I’m sure many other people can as well. The thing I can’t figure out is why do people not tune up regularly? Doesn’t it hurt their ears? It shouldn’t be that way, people should learn how to tune their guitars.

I saw a YouTube video of a girl performing a song, I forgot what it was, but it was really weird, since she played semi-well, but her guitar was really out of tune. I guess she missed that day when her teacher taught tuning.

Tuning your guitar

Keeping your guitar is not difficult at all. You just gotta learn it once, and that’s it. If your guitar is semi decent, it won’t go out of tune every 2 hours either.

So the most important tuning you’ll need to learn is the standard guitar tuning. There are other alternate tunings, but don’t worry about them until you become a strong intermediate player. Standard tuning is the most widely used guitar tuning, so let’s concentrate on that.

You have 4 strings, and each of them has a dedicated pitch. Here they are, in ascending order:

E – A – D – G – B – e

The first string is the lowest string, the last is the highest. Notice that the notes are the same, but the higher one is marked with a small “e”, to differentiate them.

Here is a cool video on the actual notes you’re aiming for. Each note is plucked 10 times, which means each note is played for about 25 seconds. If you’re done with one string, move on to the next:

Standard guitar tuning acronyms

There are useful standard tuning acronyms that will help you remember the notes of each string. Here are a couple:

• Eat All Day Get Big Easy
• Eddy Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie
• Elephant And Donkey Got Big Ears

Feel free to make up your own acronyms as well, they make remembering the notes of each string much simpler.