A short, practical tutorial by Lauren Bateman teaching beginners how to tune a six-string guitar using a clip-on tuner. The video names the six strings (high E, B, G, D, A, low E), explains tuner symbols (sharp = too high, flat = too low) and LED readouts (green = in tune, red = too low, yellow = too high), and demonstrates turning tuning pegs slowly to reach each target note while avoiding string breakage. The host gives memory mnemonics for string order and recommends practicing by intentionally detuning and retuning.
Questions this video answers
Six.
High E, B, G, D, A, Low E (bottom to top).
# (sharp) = note is too high; b (flat) = note is too low. (Green LED = in tune; red = too low; yellow = too high.)
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. And hopefully you watched my last videos on how to hold your guitar, how to get your guitar strap set up so that you're comfortable playing the guitar. The next step in the process is we have to have our guitar sound good. So you see in my hand here, I have this thing. It is called a tuner. Okay. This is how we tune the guitar to make it sound good. Alright? This one here is a snark clip on tuner. These work great. What you do is you just clip them to the headstock of your guitar. And there is a little LED light on this that tells you if the note is too high in pitch or if it's too low in pitch. But in order to do that, we have to know exactly what we're tuning our guitar to. And every one of these strings on your guitar, there's six of them. They each have their own unique name. So let's learn what those are first. You'll see here on the bottom of my guitar directionally. Directionally. Bottom of the guitar is a very thin string, okay? We call this the high E string because it sounds higher in pitch, okay. As we move up the guitar, we are going to move lower in pitch, right? So we have E. My second string here is B. My third string is G.
My fourth string is D. My fifth string is A, and my sixth string is E. So we call that the low E string so you can hear the difference in pitch. Here's the high E string. Ding. And the low E string.
And you can remember this from the bottom to the top by saying Easter bunnies get donuts at Easter or Eddie ate dynamite. Goodbye Eddie. If you down, that's how you can remember how to tune your guitar. Because when you get it right, the guitar will sound fantastic. If the guitar is out of tune, it's gonna sound like crap no matter how good of a guitar player you are. So what I want to show you in this video is how to use a guitar tuner to get your guitar in tune. And there's two important things that you need to know Before I go in for a close up on this, there's going to be two symbols on your tuner, all right? One looks like a tic tac toe. All right? We're hashtag depending on how old you are, but it's going to look like a pound sign and that is called a sharp. Okay? That means that the note is too high. The opposite is a little B, which we call a flat. Think of a flat tire. So B is Flat, it's too high. Low like a flat tire would be. So we either have sharp, which is too high, and we have flat, which is too low. Okay? And the reason that's important to know is because when we are using our tuner, if we see any of those symbols show up on our guitar, we're going to be on the wrong note. So, for example, so when I'm tuning this G string, if I see G and I see a flat or a tic tac toe on the LED screen, that's not the right note. What we want is just G by itself. All right? We call that a natural note in music. So we just want letters, no other symbols on screen with the letter. Okay? So now that you know about the different strings and you know about the sharps and the flats and to be on the lookout for that, we're going to go in for a close up where I'm just going to show you this headstock portion of my guitar. And, and what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be turning these tuning pegs in different directions. If you have an acoustic guitar like mine, you'll have three on the top and three on the bottom. Okay. My electric here also has that same setup. But if you have a Strat, all your tuning pegs are going to be on the same side. It's totally fine. The functionality is still the same. We're going to turn these clockwise or counterclockwise to get the strings in tune with the reading on the LED stream. So let's go in for a close up right now. All right, so I'm in for my close up now. And you see I have my LED screen which is picking up my voice. It's picking up the vibration through the guitar here. Because what it does, how this works, is the vibrations of the guitar come into the headstock and it tells me what note I'm on. So my guitar.
Sounds really, really bad. So we're going to tune this by using the. These tuning pegs. And all I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the high E string, which for me is this tuning peg here. And on the strings I'm just going to pick down. Now, you can see here, this has D, but it's not D, it's D sharp. You see that little tic tac toe? That's what I was talking about earlier. So in the musical Alphabet, it's A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And then it repeats again. So it's just like the regular Alphabet. So D is below E. So I have to go higher. Okay, so I'm just gonna slowly tune. You can see that. Turn to E now. And there it is. I'm just gonna get right in the middle of that green. Now you're gonna see red. I'll go to this next one. You're gonna see red, led, A green in the middle, green, little arrow in the middle. And then you're gonna see yellow. Yellow means it's too high. Red means it's too low. Green means you're spot on. But you have to look at the letter in the middle, because if you have the wrong letter, it doesn't matter. So even if I put this in the middle, and I was like, great, I'm on A. This is the second string. Remember, this has to be tuned to B. So we're too low. We need to go higher, and we got to get to B. We don't want to be on A sharp. We want to be on B. There. There it is. And I. You know, you might go a little bit too far like I did. Just slowly lower down. You see, I'm not yanking these. I'm just going nice and slow. A lot of students, they yank them, and then they end up breaking a string, and that's not good. So this one's on F, but this string needs to be G. So I'm just gonna slowly turn it until it gets to G. There we go. Beautiful. Right there. Now we're moving to the thick strings, the top three strings. And I've got a D. Well, that's pretty close because this is supposed to be D. So I just gotta fine tune that one. And a lot of times, if you go and put your guitar away, that's all you're going to have to do is fine tune it. I yanked some of these, so they're off a little bit. But this one's a sharp. We do not want a sharp that's too high. Remember, a sharp is high. So we're going to lower this down to A. And I'm just going to keep hitting that string, that A string, until I get it right there in the middle. Went a little bit too low. There we go. And you can see how that green light's kind of blinking in and out that spot pretty good, too. Sometimes it's hard to get it dead on. All right. But if you're pretty close, that works, too. And then this next one is going to be a.
F, which is too high again. So we want to lower this down into the E range. Get that right in the middle. And you can see there it is, lining it up using this LED screen. And again, I'm not yanking. Not yanking any of these. Go very, very slow, and it's always easier to go from a lower note to a higher note. So the three strings that break the easiest are these three, these thin strings. So go very, very gentle with them. Do not yank them. Okay? These are the strings that students break the most. So when you're practicing tuning, practice up here. Fortunately, your guitar is probably not going to go widely out of tune, and you'll just have to fine tune. But use extra caution on the bottom three strings. So now that we've got our guitar back in tune, it should sound really, really nice and a great exercise that I would recommend you do right now before you jump onto the next lesson in this series is putting your guitar out of tune and putting it back in tune. Take it out of tune. Put it back in tune. This will help you to start getting used to hearing and seeing what when a note is spot on with its tuning. Okay. And this is something. It's going to take you a long time in the beginning, but the more and more you do it, you'll be able to tune up your guitar in less than a minute. But the first time, it's going to be a little bit tricky. But just go slow. I'd recommend using the thicker strings because they're less likely to break. Okay, Use the thicker strings. Just give it a quick twist one way or the other, and then get it out of tune. Put it back in tune. So now that your guitar is in tune and sounding good, we are one step closer to learning your first song. But I first have to teach you how to hold a very, very important accessory that's part of playing guitar, and that is the guitar pick. Go over and watch that video where I'm going to give you a few different options for you to figure out which is the best for you.
