How to tune a guitar (with a tuner, or by ear)

This page is for anyone who has a guitar in their hands and is not sure it sounds right. How do you tune a guitar? There are three ways, and they all end in the same place: the six strings reading E A D G B E, from the thickest to the thinnest. You can use an online tuner and your microphone, which is the fastest and the most accurate. You can clip a small tuner onto the headstock, which is what players use on stage. Or you can tune the guitar to itself by ear, with the fifth fret method, which needs nothing at all. The online tuner is right below this paragraph, so you can start there and read the rest afterwards.

Standard tuning: E A D G B E

Standard tuning is what almost every lesson, tab and chord chart assumes, and it is where to start unless a song tells you otherwise. Read from the thickest string to the thinnest, the six notes are E, A, D, G, B and E again. The outer two strings are both E, two octaves apart, which is why the pattern looks like it almost repeats and then does not.

The usual way to remember the order is a sentence whose initials spell it: Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie. It runs from the low E up to the high E, in the order you will tune them. Say it once or twice while you look at the strings and it tends to stay.

Which way to turn the machine head

Tightening a string raises its pitch, loosening it lowers it. That is the only part that is always true. Which direction the peg itself turns is not the same on every guitar, because machine heads sit on both sides of the headstock on a classical guitar and on one side of most steel string guitars. So think about the string rather than the peg: turn a little, listen or read the tuner, and keep going if the pitch is moving the way you want. If it is moving the wrong way, turn back.

The six notes and their frequencies

These are the pitches a tuner is aiming for, with A4 at 440 Hz as the reference the whole set is built from.

With an online tuner

This is how to tune a guitar with a guitar tuner, and it is the method to learn first. The tuner at the top of this page listens through your microphone, names the note it hears and shows how far off it is in cents, so you can see which way to turn before you touch anything. It runs in the browser, on a phone or a computer, with no account and nothing to install. Here are the five steps it expects.

1. Press Start and allow the microphone. Nothing is recorded or uploaded: the signal is analyzed in your browser and discarded. Find a quiet spot while you are at it, because background noise is the main reason a reading will not sit still.
2. Play the open sixth string, the low E, and mute the other five with your palm so only one note reaches the microphone. Let it settle for a second before you read the display.
3. Read the note name and the number of cents. Left of zero, the string is too low and wants tightening. Right of zero, it is too high and wants loosening. A cent is one hundredth of a semitone, so anything inside a few cents already sounds right.
4. Turn the machine head in small moves, letting the note settle between each one. If the string is too high, go clearly below the target and then tighten back up to it. Arriving at a note by tightening is what makes the tuning hold.
5. Work up through A, D, G, B and the high E, then go round all six again. Tightening one string pulls slightly on the neck, so the first pass is never the last word. Finish by strumming an open chord you know well and listening for one string beating against the others.

The full tool has its own page, with presets for the alternate tunings, for bass and ukulele, and a reference pitch you can set: the online guitar tuner. Bookmark whichever of the two you prefer, and it is there the next time you pick up the guitar.

With a clip-on or pedal tuner

A clip-on tuner clamps onto the headstock and ignores the air entirely. A small piezo sensor inside it reads the vibration traveling through the wood, which is a completely different signal from the sound in the room. A pedal tuner does the equivalent job for an electric guitar: it sits in the cable between the guitar and the amplifier and reads the pickup directly.

That is why both are the standard answer on stage and in a band. A microphone cannot separate your guitar from the drummer warming up, from the conversation at the bar, or from the other guitarist tuning six feet away. A sensor touching your headstock, or wired to your pickup, hears none of that. A pedal tuner also mutes your signal while you tune, so the room does not have to listen to it.

The limits are worth knowing. A clip-on needs firm contact with the headstock, so a loose clip or a padded finish gives a jumpy reading. It feels nothing on a solid body electric that is played unplugged, because the vibration never reaches the wood with much strength. Inexpensive models often display in whole semitones with a small bar rather than in cents, which is accurate enough for a quick check and not enough for fine work. And a pedal tuner is no use at all on an acoustic guitar without a pickup. For practicing at home, the tuner on this page does the same job with nothing to buy.

Without a tuner: the 5th fret method

How to tune a guitar without a tuner is a genuinely useful thing to know, for two reasons. It trains your ear, which no screen will do for you, and one day you will have a guitar and no phone. The method tunes the guitar to itself, so it needs one reliable starting note and nothing else.

1. Get one string right first, and the low E is the usual choice. Take it from a piano, from another guitar that is already tuned, from a tuning fork, or from the reference note on the tuner above. Everything that follows is measured against this string, so it is the one that has to be correct.
2. Press the fifth fret of the low E string. That note is an A, the same note as the open A string next to it. Play the two one after the other, then together, and turn the A string until they stop fighting each other.
3. Move along: the fifth fret of the A string gives you the note of the open D string. Tune the D string to it the same way.
4. The fifth fret of the D string gives you the open G. Tune the G string to it.
5. Here is the one exception, and it catches everybody. For the B string, use the fourth fret of the G string, not the fifth. The gap between G and B is smaller than all the others, which is what the shifted fret is for.
6. Back to the fifth fret for the last one: the fifth fret of the B string gives you the open high E. Then strum a chord you know well. If it sounds sour, a small error near the beginning has traveled all the way up, so start again from the string you trust.

The same method with natural harmonics

Once the strings are close, harmonics will get you the rest of the way more precisely than fretted notes. Rest a left hand finger lightly on the string directly over the fifth fret wire, without pressing it down, and pick: you get a clear bell-like note. The harmonic over the fifth fret of one string matches the harmonic over the seventh fret of the string below it, so compare the fifth fret harmonic of the low E with the seventh fret harmonic of the A, then A with D, then D with G.

The B string is the exception again, because this trick does not work on it. Compare the seventh fret harmonic of the low E string with the open B string instead, then tune the high E from the B with the fifth fret method.

What you are listening for

Two notes that are nearly the same pitch do not sound like two notes. They sound like one note with a slow pulse in it, a wobble that gets faster as the two pitches move further apart and slower as they come together. That pulse is the beating, and it is the whole secret of tuning by ear: you are not trying to judge whether a note is high or low, which is hard, you are turning the peg until the wobble slows down and disappears, which is easy. When it is gone, the two notes are the same.

Acoustic vs electric: what changes

The notes are identical. What changes is how the sound reaches the tuner, and that is enough to make the same tuner behave differently on the two instruments.

One thing is specific to the electric, and it surprises people the first time. If the guitar has a floating vibrato, a Fender style unit on two points or a Floyd Rose, the six strings are all pulling against one spring assembly. Tightening one string tilts the whole bridge and takes the other five slightly out of tune with it. Nothing is broken. Just go round all six strings three or four times in a row, with smaller corrections each pass, and they converge. A guitar with a fixed bridge usually settles in two.

Why your guitar goes out of tune

A guitar that will not stay in tune is usually not a broken guitar. A handful of ordinary causes cover nearly all of it.

• New strings stretch. A fresh set keeps settling for the first few hours of playing. Tune, play for a few minutes, tune again, and repeat. It stops on its own.
• Temperature and humidity move the wood and the strings. A guitar carried in from the cold, or left next to a radiator, will be out of tune when you open the case. Let it come to room temperature before you chase it, because tuning a cold guitar only means tuning it twice.
• The winding at the post may be the problem. If one string in particular drifts, look at how it is wound. Two or three tidy turns down the post, with no overlap and no slack at the hole, hold far better than a loose bundle, which slowly tightens itself under tension and lets the pitch fall.
• The machine heads. A loose machine head lets tension creep out of the string. The screw that holds the button is often simply undone, and a quarter turn with a small screwdriver fixes a guitar that seemed hopeless.
• The nut. If a string makes a small ping as you tune it and then jumps, it is binding in its slot at the nut instead of sliding. A badly cut or dirty slot does that, and it is worth having looked at, because no amount of careful tuning works around it.

Alternate tunings

Standard tuning is not the only one, and three alternatives cover most of what you will meet in songs. None of them is harder to tune than standard: they are the same operation with different target notes.

Half step down, Eb standard. Every string drops by one semitone, so the guitar reads Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb. Because all six move by the same amount, your chord shapes and your tabs keep working exactly as written, and the song simply comes out a semitone lower, which is often the whole point: it brings a melody into an easier range to sing. This is what people mean by how to tune guitar half step down, and the half step down tuner opens on that preset already.

Drop D. Only the low E string moves, down a whole step to D, giving D A D G B E. The other five stay exactly where they were, so everything you know still works above the sixth string, and you gain a power chord you can play with one finger across the three lowest strings. It is the quickest alternate tuning to try and the quickest to undo: the Drop D tuner opens there.

Open D. Three strings move, and the result is D A D F# A D, which means the open strings already sound a D major chord. A straight barre laid across any fret gives you another major chord, which is why slide players live in this tuning. It changes more of your bearings than the other two, and it is worth the detour for exactly that reason: see the Open D tuner.

Drop C. Drop D taken a whole step further down, which gives C G C F A D. The shape of the tuning is the same, so the one finger power chord and every Drop D riff transfer unchanged and simply sound two frets lower. This is the one that asks something of the guitar in return: all six strings lose tension, so heavier strings and a look at the setup come with it. The Drop C tuner opens there and widens its analysis window for the low C.

Open G. Three strings move down a whole step and three do not move at all, giving D G D G B D, so the open strings sound a G major chord. Like Open D it turns a straight barre into a chord, which is why so much blues slide and roots rhythm playing lives in it. The lowest string is the fifth of the chord rather than its root, and plenty of players leave it out of the way for exactly that reason: the Open G tuner opens on it.

A bass and a ukulele are tuned the same way, with different notes and a tuner that has to look at a different part of the spectrum. There are pages for both: the bass tuner for four and five string basses, and the ukulele tuner for standard, low G and baritone.

Who made this

Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. The tools come out of his lessons, which is why this one shows you cents rather than a green light, and why none of them asks you to sign up before it works. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way.

More about Yohann and how these tools are made.