Tune Your Guitar Without an Electronic Tuner

Tuning a guitar can be tricky business if you don’t have access to an electronic chromatic tuner. Often times I can’t find mine and have to rely on either my ears or other resources in order to properly retune strings that have fallen out of tune or been placed in a different tuning in previous sessions. There are a few ways that you can tune your guitar without the aid of an electronic tuner.

Before you start, know that all of these methods will be “by ear tuning.” An electronic tuner detects sound and tells you on a digital display how close you are to hitting the note or if you are too sharp or flat. When you tune by ear, you need to rely on audio cues and characteristics of sound to tune properly. In general, when tuning by ear you use two sounds and try to match them together. The closer you get to matching the sounds, the more you will hear a kind of resonating effect when the two vibrations occur in tandem. For example, if you play an E that you know is an E, you can tune another guitar string to an E by listening for when the two vibrations begin to resonate. Now that you know this basic principle, we can move on to the different methods for tuning your guitar without an electronic tuner.

One of the best ways to tune your guitar is to use another instrument that has already been tuned. Of course this will only work if you have access to said instrument. If a guitar is the only instrument you own, then you will not be able to use this method. The ideal instrument to use as a basis for tuning is one that does not easily fall out of tune. Brass instruments have more or less stable tuning, but the ideal instrument to use is an electronic keyboard. Today’s digital keyboards never fall out of tune like old Moogs, so they can be used as a reliable source of perfectly tuned notes. Now, all you need to do is to play a note on the keyboard that you want the string on the guitar to sound like when it is played in the open (non-fretted position). Play the note on the keyboard, then play the guitar string and try to match up the two tones. Remember to listen for that resonation that tells you that the two vibrations are fairly close. Remember that a keyboard has several different octaves, so be sure to play the octave that matches what you are tuning the guitar string to.

The second method involves using the guitar itself. This method requires you to know either exactly what a certain tone sounds like when it is properly tuned, or the knowledge that one of your strings is fairly stable and doesn’t go out of tune much. Let’s say that you know exactly how the 6^th string E should sound, or you know that it would take a tornado to take that string out of tune. The next step requires knowing about a nuance of the guitar neck. The notes on the neck are so arranged that in standard tuning, a note can be found two strings down and two frets forward. For example, let’s say you play the fifth fret on the 6th string on a guitar in standard E tuning. This note is an A natural. Two strings down on the 4^th string and two frets forward on the 7^th fret will give you an A as well. To sum up, the fifth fret on the 6^th string is the same note as the seventh fret on the fourth string. Now that you know this, you can pluck these two strings and attempt to match up the two tones. Listen for that resonation.

If you can’t tell for sure that one string is in tune enough to act as a tuning base, or if you can’t remember how a tone is supposed to sound, then you can always tune your guitar another way. Online there are a number of resources that contain audio files of certain guitar tones. This way you can tune your guitar much in the same fashion as with a digital keyboard. I know this isn’t exactly tuning your guitar without an electronic tuner per say, but in the absence of a handheld electronic tuner, the internet is a viable alternative. Here is an example of an online tuning resource.

http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/onlinetuner.html

I hope this helped. Now you should have a pretty good handle on how to tune your guitar without an electronic tuner. Best of luck and happy playing!