How To Tune A Guitar: A Guide For Beginners

 

How to tune a guitar in standard tuning

There are several different guitar tuning profiles, but the most popular one by far is ‘standard tuning’.

In standard tuning, the notes of the guitar, from thickest to thinnest are:

E, A, D, G, B, E

How to remember the notes of the guitar strings

Here’s two useful mnemonics to help you remember the order “E, A, D, G, B, E”.

• Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears
• Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie

Pick whichever one you like best, or make up your own. (The sillier the better.)

Now we know the notes we’re aiming for we can tune the guitar

You’ve already learned the first half of how to tune a guitar, well done!

Now we need to look at how to tune a guitar to E, A, D, G, B, E.

How to tune a guitar to E, A, D, G, B, E

Look at your guitar’s headstock (the thin end of the guitar).

You will see small ‘keys’ that you can turn. We call these ‘machine heads’.

Each string is attached to a machine head of its own. When we turn a machine head we change the pitch that the string is tuned to.

How do we know what note the string is tuned to when we’re turning the machine heads?

Easy. We use a tuner to tell us! 🙂