Acoustic Guitar 101

with Scott Law

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Acoustic Guitar 101 - Section 1

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Acoustic Guitar 101 Lessons: Lesson 7: Tuning the Guitar - Part 1

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[MUSIC]
All right,

let's work on the next.

Our next project is gonna be getting
around learning to tune the guitar.

And this is a deep subject,
and one that is very handy.

And will be very handy for all of us,

as we go down this path with the guitar.

It's challenging at times, especially in
the beginning, but it's totally doable.

You can do this.

What I would say is,
I'm gonna present three basic ways.

I'm gonna present the way that I was
first taught to self reference tune, and

then another way that I learned
to self reference tune.

Which, what I mean by self
reference means, taking getting

one of your strings in tune with
what is known as Standard Pitch.

And then tuning the rest of
the guitar from that pitch,

getting the guitar in tune with itself.

And then, there'll be a third
way that I'm gonna show,

which is going to be
around use of a tuner.

Which now tuners are ubiquitous.

They're available everywhere.

You can even now have one in your phone.

I could not have imagined that.

When I started playing guitar.

And, that's a pretty neat thing.

Thing about all of these methods is that,
it's not perfect science.

And guitars are a compromise.

The system of the frets and
the tuning of the guitar is a compromise

in order to be able to play in all keys.

And,you do notice on
the guitar the distance

gets smaller this way as we go
further up the neck, the distances

between the frets get smaller, and
that's just string science there at work.

If these had no frets on them,
like a violin or

a double bass, an upright bass,
we would have only

our ears really to use to know where
the center of those pitches are.

But on a guitar, you have the frets.

You hold down the string behind the fret
and I hold it just behind the fret.

And with my fingertips, and that placement
of the fret is what gives us our pitch.

We can affect pitch on the guitar
even though we're fretting notes.

I will say that there are ways to do that,

that we'll get into that
a little bit later.

When you're playing in tune or the in
tuneness of things, is called Intonation.

And there are various ways that
you can sort of fudge intonation

while you're fretting notes.

What I mean by that is playing notes.

[SOUND] But, the intonation of
the instrument is also basically fudged

just to make this thing work, so
you can play in lots of different keys.

So let's work on, first just getting
to know how we can self-reference tune.

But in order to do that, we would,

I think we should activate our first note,
and just check that out.

Now, I'm gonna use a pick.

Cuz I mostly use a pick first, and

then I'm gonna do it with my thumb and
show you.

What I do suggest is when you're tuning,
if you tune with

the technique that you're gonna be playing
in, if you're gonna be playing mostly with

your third fingers, strike the notes
when you tune with your bare finger.

If you're gonna be tuning, I mean playing
with a flat pick, tune with a flat pick.

A lot of it is, if you really
get into the detail of things,

it's even on down to
how the note is struck.

So I'm gonna strike
a note with my pick here,

and I'm gonna start with an A string.

Now, this is how I was taught.

First, my A string is the fifth string.

[SOUND] I was taught
a system where we self

referenced by playing the note of the next

string on that string that you just tuned.

Now assuming that my A string is in tune,

I'm gonna show you quickly here and
then we're gonna go in detail.

It would be something like this.

Now I'm tuning the D string by
playing a D on the A string.

Now I'm gonna tune the G string
by playing a G on the D string.

This is the D string, the fourth string.

There's the B, there's the E.

Okay, and then the E string.

[MUSIC]
The low E.

This is a good place just to take
a pause and talk about what are the open

strings of the guitar, and
how do we communicate about them.

So, this is how I look at it like this.

And I think this is kind of
a conventional way of looking at it.

I think of the lowest string as
[MUSIC]

the low E.

And, it's not obviously
in terms of gravity.

[LAUGH] Low, it's low in terms of pitch.

[SOUND] That's a low,
compared to a [SOUND] high E.

So interesting thing to know.

We've go two E's, a low E, and a high E.

[SOUND] We number them though,
from the high E, which is number 1.

[SOUND] Then the number 2 string is the B.

[SOUND] The number three string is the G.

The number four is the D.

Number five is A, and number six is E.

So, the old six string.

E, B, G, D, A, E.

And that's high to low.

You can go low to high.

E-A-D-G-B-E.

[MUSIC]

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