Thursday, October 24, 2013

Online Guitar Tuner

By Alicia Robertson


A quality guitar tuner is a crucial tool in any guitarist's gig bag. A typical acoustic guitar has six strings, each of which is adjusted to produce a specific pitch (or musical note). While there are many varieties of guitar tunings, the strings on a standard guitar are tuned, from lowest to highest note, as follows: E-A-D-G-B-E.

I played guitar for the first time when I was in college when a friend let me borrow his guitar. After a some time, the friend came over to look in on me. I strummed a few chords I had been practicing. He cringed. Because I had been playing so much, the instrument was out of tune, way out of tune. I had never played a musical instrument before so I lacked the ability to hear that the instrument had gone out of tune.

Some parts of playing the guitar are obvious, for example: fretting chords, picking, strumming, etc. What is not so obvious is that developing a musical ear is just as important. For a beginner to really improve his or her musical ear, it is essential to consistently play in tune.

Double Dropped Tunings: Have the sixth and first strings tuned down one full step.

It used to be that many people used the Boss TU-2 electric guitar tuner as their go-to tuner. There was a problem with the TU-2, however. It was only accurate to +/- 3 cents (a cent refers to 1/100 of the distance between consecutive notes). If you have a highly trained musical ear, you can hear a 3 cents difference. Making matters worse, when two guitarists play together, each guitarist usually has his or her own tuner. If they each had a TU-2 electric guitar tuner, the two guitars could be out of tune as much as 6 cents with respect to each other.

There are many cheap "entry level" tuners, but be careful, as you may end up frustrated by a tuner that is unable to correctly determine the pitch of your strings.

Lower and Higher Tunings: The strings are all tuned either higher or lower by the same interval. These tunings are usually to accommodate the vocal range of the singer. For the higher tunings the guitar strings need to be very thin as they are under extreme tension (they are therefore prone to breakage).




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