All About Guitar Tuners

Which Guitar Tuner Should You Choose?

Using a guitar tuner is one of the easiest methods of tuning the guitar. A wide variety of guitar tuners are available in the music shops around Portland, and they vary widely in features and price. Some clip to your guitar’s headstock. Others detect your guitar’s pitch via built-in microphones.

Pedal tuners are built into electric guitar pedal enclosures, and are great for live performance situations, as depressing the pedal simultaneously activates the tuner and mutes the guitar, so your audience doesn’t have to listen to you tuning. There’s also the rack-mount variety of tuner, but most beginners won’t have much use for those, especially at first.

For the beginning guitarist, I typically recommend the clip-on tuners with bright displays. They make it easy to tune the guitar in noisy situations, they’re easy to see in low light, and you can leave them clipped to your guitar’s headstock so you won’t forget them.

How to Use a Guitar Tuner

Using a guitar tuner is simple. You simply pluck the string, and look at the tuner’s display. If it shows that a string is sharp, then you loosen that string’s tuning peg until it’s in tune. If it’s flat, do the opposite.

Guitar Tuner Tips

It’s important to let the string ring for a moment or two, just to make sure the tuner is reading it accurately. You’ll often find that the tuner will say a string is sharp for the first second, but let the note ring out, and you should see a slight drop in pitch. Unless you’re playing very fast and hard, you’ll want to tune your guitar based on the pitch shown on the tuner after that initial drop.

It’s also important that beginning guitarists make sure they’re tuning their strings to the right notes. Your tuner might say your ‘A’ string is perfectly in tune, but if it’s tuned to a ‘G’, it’s not going to sound right. Remember: Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears.

Good Luck

If you’re a new guitar student who has been struggling to get the hang of using a guitar tuner, I hope this post helps you out.

Oh, and if you’re looking for guitar lessons in Portland, Oregon, I’d love to teach you. Click here to start taking guitar lessons.