Tune Your Guitar Without an Electronic Tuner

Three Ways of Tuning by Ear

Tuning a guitar can be tricky business if you don't have access to an electronic chromatic tuner. Often times I can't find mine and have to rely on either my ears or other resources in order to properly retune strings that have fallen out of tune or been placed in a different tuning in previous sessions. There are a few ways that you can tune your guitar without the aid of an electronic tuner.

Before you start, know that all of these methods will be "by ear tuning." An electronic tuner detects sound and tells you on a digital display how close you are to hitting the note or if you are too sharp or flat. When you tune by ear, you need to rely on audio cues and characteristics of sound to tune properly. In general, when tuning by ear you use two sounds and try to match them together. The closer you get to matching the sounds, the more you will hear a kind of resonating effect when the two vibrations occur in tandem. For example, if you play an E that you know is an E, you can tune another guitar string to an E by listening for when the two vibrations begin to resonate. Now that you know this basic principle, we can move on to the different methods for tuning your guitar without an electronic tuner.