Tuning by ear and with a clip-on tuner
This is the lesson I run first, every session, no exceptions. Before we play a single note, we tune. And I don't care if your guitar sounds close enough — close enough doesn't exist in here.
Let me tell you why I'm stubborn about it. We're at about 4,600 feet, the air is dry most of the year, and the temperature in a car or a garage swings a lot between morning and afternoon. All of that moves your strings. The wood shrinks and swells, the neck shifts a little, and the tension on each string changes. You could tune a guitar perfectly at home and have it drift flat by the time you get to class. I've retuned in the car on the way up the canyon because the temperature change knocked everything out. It's not you doing something wrong. It's just the mechanics of the instrument living in this climate.
So tune first, always. Skip this step and you'll spend the whole lesson convinced your chords sound bad, when really it's just the guitar sitting wrong.
The six strings and what they should sound like
From the thickest string to the thinnest, standard tuning is E, A, D, G, B, E. Low E is the fattest string, the one closest to your face when you're holding the guitar right. High E is the skinniest, closest to the floor.
You don't need to memorize the frequencies. You need a tuner or a decent ear, and for the first few months, lean on the tuner. There's nothing to feel bad about there.
Using a clip-on tuner
This is the tool I want you to own. They're cheap, they clip onto the headstock, and they read the pitch by feeling the vibration of the wood instead of listening through a microphone, so they still work in a noisy room.
Steps:
- Clip it onto the headstock, flat part against the wood.
- Turn it on. Most have a button on the face.
- Pluck one string at a time. Don't strum all six at once, the tuner can't sort that out.
- Watch the display. It'll show you the note name and usually an arrow or a needle showing sharp or flat.
- Turn the tuning peg slowly. A little turn changes the pitch more than you'd think. Go slow.
- When the display centers up, usually turns green, stop. Move to the next string.
Turn the pegs in small movements. Crank fast and you'll overshoot, and on an old or cheap set of strings, cranking too hard can snap one. Not dangerous, just annoying, and it'll ping you in the hand if you're not paying attention. Go slow, check the display, adjust again.
Tuning by ear, a little
Keep leaning on the tuner for now. But it helps to start training your ear alongside it, so here's the simple version. Once your low E string is in tune, you can use it to check the A string: press the low E down at the 5th fret, and that note should match the open A string. If it doesn't, adjust the A until it does. The same pattern moves up the neck, string to string. We'll work through it together in class, because it's easier to hear than to read about.
Don't stress about getting good at this fast. It's a skill that arrives slowly, over months, not in a single lesson.
About the guitar itself
Sometimes a tuning problem isn't a tuning problem at all — it's a guitar problem. If you crank a peg and the pitch won't hold, or a string buzzes no matter what you do, that can mean the neck is warped or the guitar just isn't in good shape.
Melissa from my ward texted me a photo of a thrift-store guitar last year, wondering if it was worth fixing up. The neck in that photo had a curve that was never coming out, so I told her straight: don't put money into that one. We found her a decent starter guitar instead, nothing fancy, and she's been playing it happily ever since.
I'd rather tell you the truth about your instrument than cheer you on over a guitar that's never going to hold a tune. If something feels wrong, bring it to class and I'll take a look.
A quick word on humidity
Keep your guitar out of dry, hot spots. Don't leave it in a closed car in summer, and don't set it right next to a heat vent in winter. If you can, a cheap guitar humidifier in the case helps a lot out here. Dry air is genuinely hard on wood instruments, and plenty of people lose a guitar to it without ever figuring out why.
Before next time
Grab your clip-on tuner if you don't have one yet, and tune your guitar once a day, even on days you don't practice. Just the tuning. It's good reps for your hands, and it means next week we're not starting from scratch.