Guitar trouble? What should I do?!
Question: I was playing my guitar, and the strings sounded different, so I tried to tune them, (I have no idea how to tune). I just messed them up worse than they were. Strings G and B sound terrible. Any way to fix this or ... how do I tune them? What should I do?
Answers: I was playing my guitar, and the strings sounded different, so I tried to tune them, (I have no idea how to tune). I just messed them up worse than they were. Strings G and B sound terrible. Any way to fix this or ... how do I tune them? What should I do?
I'm with jjmusic on this except for the part about twisting the neck because that's just untrue. Don't worry about the neck when tuning.
I'd also leave the electronic tuners out. These are fine for tuning if there is too much background noise for you to hear your own guitar, but other than that, I consider them a crutch that prevents you from learning. I'd recommend a pitch pipe instead, and even as you only need to hear one note, the pipe made for guitar players is quite handy. Take a look at one here:
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/P...
Another suggestion (in learning to tune from hearing just one note using jjmusic's method described above) is to rest your jaw (anywhere between your chin and your ear and this is NO JOKE) directly on the guitar. Between your ear and the vibrations that pass through your jawbone, you should be able to tune quickly, easily and WITHOUT BATTERIES! I've used this method for over 40 years so it's about as "tried and true" as it gets.
Kabum (guitar teacher/piano tuner)
A Beatles fan eh? I think I love you XD Kidding, but I love the Beatles too
Remember this rhyme
Eddy
Ate
Dynamite
Good
Bye
Eddy
You're using a tuner right? Anyhow, remember that rhyme, that's the order of them, from top to bottom
You can go to someplace like Guitar Center and buy a good electronic tuner or just take it into the store and one of the reps would help you out.
the actual tuning of individual strings isnt the hard part. buy a tuner or a pitch-pipe (if you have a good ear) and try tuning just the highest E string. Then after you have that in tune, move to the low E string and tune it. now check the tuning of the high E again. you may notice it has changed slightly. this is because when you tune a guitar, its just like tuning a drumhead or even putting a wheel on a car. you have to go back and forth between strings from the outside to the inside, not in order. or the neck will twist and detune other strings making the process a lot harder and take longer. to check uniform tuning, hold the B string on the 5th fret and play it and the high E string together. do the same for all of the other strings, holding thenext string down on the 5th fret to check the string below it. except for the G string must be held down on the 4th fret to check tuning with the B string. good luck!