Tuning Tip

While showing beginner guitarists my first blog post, I asked for requests. There are many different tips, tricks and tutorials to be taught. I am trying to ease into being a blogger and conveying messages is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I have many different lessons planned for future posts but for now I am trying to pick a few helpful tips for you while making it easy on me. Teaching through an online medium is different. Although I have the ability to reach a mass amount of people, conveying the videos to be clear and concise to everybody is near impossible.

I received many different requests this week. While chatting with classmates who are new guitarists, I learned they have trouble tuning the guitar. If that was not a smack to the face of a sign that two new guitarists both have trouble tuning their guitar, I don’t know what is. So I decided this week will be on TUNING.

The most common way new guitarists tune the guitar is through tuning devices or applications on the phone or websites like ChordBook.com which has an online tuner here. I think KNOW it is very important to learn how to tune your guitar by ear like how I am going to teach you. Tuning by ear helps:

Developing your ear and hearing the notes

Making all notes relative to each other

Learning more about the guitar and how it is set up

Not relying on anything else

One thing that is different about tuning by ear is unless you’re playing by yourself, you must have something that is already the correct note. If you tune five strings relative to your Low E string and your Low E string is actually closer the being an F, the rest of your strings will be more sharp than normal but still relative to the whole guitar. I will talk more about this in the video I create.

To clarify in the video, I moved down five frets on each string to tune the next lighter string; all except the B string which I only moved down 4 frets on the G string (third lightest string). For the harmonics, I barely touched the five bracket and the next lighter seven bracket; all except the B string again where I touched the G’s fourth and the B’s fifth. It is smart to try to tune both ways to make sure it sounds correct both ways. You can also check different variations throughout the guitar if you know multiple notes across the guitar. For example, the open fifth string (A) and the second fret on the third string (A). Another example is the first fret on the second string and third fret on the fifth string are both C and so on.

I showed two songs in the end of my tutorial that you can play to test your guitar in sounding correct. Here is the tab for Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd and here is the tab for More Than A Feeling by Boston.

Weekly Challenge

Learn the RIFF of the week and SOLO of the week

*Note – I realized that last week I may have chosen too difficult of songs. This week I picked a song that is a lot easier to learn and play.

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The weekly riff I challenge you to learn is Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

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The weekly solo I challenge you to learn is the first solo in Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I couldn’t find the tabs so I quickly made this.

1st Solo e|------------------------------------------------------------| B|------------------------------------------------------------| G|---------7-----------5-5------------------------------------| D|---------7-----------5-5---------------5-------------0------| A|--7h8h9------9h7-5h7-----7-------------5-------0p2----------| E|----------------------------------5h6h7---------------------|

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For a bonus, here is Fireflies by Owl City arranged by Sungha Jung

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I hope my tip will help improve your playing and if you want more tricks and tips you can SUBSCRIBE in the upper-right hand corner.

Leave comment below if you have any questions or requests of tutorials, riffs, or solos.

– Josh Yager