How To Tune A Guitar Without A Tuner By Ear For Beginners

How To Tune A Guitar By Ear Without A Tuner For Beginners

Thanks for watching my How To Tune A Guitar By Ear Without A Tuner For Beginners video tutorial. I hope you found it helpful.

Tuning your guitar with the help of a modern clip-on guitar is pretty straight forward. But how to tune a guitar without a tuner is a completely different question. Now, the good news is, there is in fact a pretty easy method to do that, which works just fine. It does however one specific drawback which I will explain in more detail in a second.

A lot of guitar beginners ask the question as to how to tune an acoustic guitar by ear. Now, one thing I need to explain right of the bat, whether we are talking about an acoustic guitar, classical guitar, western guitar or even if you’re wondering how to tune an electric guitar by ear, the method I demonstrated in the video works for all kind of guitars – granted we are talking about a six string.

Coming back to the aforementioned drawback. With this method, you will have to rely on your ears. And that’s especially difficult for guitar beginners. But all it takes is some good old practice and then it will become second nature. Here is the step by step guideline as to how to tune a guitar by ear without a tuner:

In a first step, you start off with the low E-String. You will have to tune that string to the best of your ability. There is just no way around it. Now, once you’re done with that, you play the low E-Sting in the fifth fret which gives you the pitch of A. This note/tone is now the reference to tune your A-String.

After you are done tuning the A-String accordingly, you need a reference pitch for the D-String. That pitch can be found by playing the A-String in the 5th fret.

You now follow the same method all the way through. There is one exception. For tuning the B-String, you need to play the G-String in the 4th (not the 5th) fret to get the pitch of B.

Here is another illustration on a string by string level as to how to tune a guitar without a tuner by ear:

E String 5th fret = A String
A String 5th fret = D String
D String 5th fret = G String
G String 4th fret = B String
B String 5th fret = e String (high e-String)

I remember the first few times when I tried to tune a guitar just by ear without a tuner. I broke quite a few strings. As I said, it takes some time and you need some practice. But with this method, you will be able to tune your instrument easily – the reason why I say that, there are some other methods, however, those are a little bit more complicated. So if I was you I would stick with this one for now.

If you brand new to the guitar though, trying to figure out how to tune a guitar by ear for beginners can be overwhelming. So, get yourself one of those cheap tuning devices. They are a huge help and they will spare you a good deal of frustration.

So, I hope you found this little guide around “How To Tune A Guitar By Ear Without A Tuner For Beginners” helpful. If you have any questions that I didn’t answer in the video, please leave a comment below. Thanks a lot for watching.