NO TUNER? No Problem! - Tuning An Acoustic Guitar Without A Tuner

Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here answering the question of Lauren, how do I tune my guitar if I don't have a tuner? So we're going to go over that in this guitar lesson video. Let's get to it.

So I had a YouTube commenter ask about this on a video of mine on how to tune the guitar, and they said, well, what if I don't have a guitar tuner? Can you show us how to tune your guitar without using a tuner? So I'm going to show you. I have my acoustic guitar today, but you can do this on an electric guitar as well. So first, let's go over kind of the cons of tuning without a tuner and the pros as well. So, first off, a con is if you tune your guitar just to itself, it means that if you go and play with other musicians, you're probably not going to be in tune with those other musicians. So it's great if you're alone and maybe you don't have a guitar tuner or you go to someone's house. This happens a lot of times. I go to someone's house and they have a guitar that's been sitting in the corner for like a year that they don't know how to play. And I can tune up the guitar by ear, get the guitar sounding good itself, but it may not be at the right what we call hertz level. When we tune our guitar, our guitar is tuned to what we call 440Hz. That's the A string of the guitar. You'll probably hear that. If you ever heard an orchestra tuning up, that's the note they're tuning to. That's when you hear the violin playing. That's essentially what they're doing. They're tuning to the violinist's A. So this way, everyone is working and sounding good together. So if you're going to play with others, either tune off someone else's guitar or use a guitar tuner so that you all sound right. But if you're not playing with someone else, this technique and method will work fine. So let's get into how we're going to do that. Now, the way the guitar is strung and this, the cool thing about the guitar, we have multiples of the same note. So, for example, the fifth fret of our top E string is an A note. Well, guess what? The open string below that is a, a, A. Hear that? It's the same note. So if my guitar were out of tune, and I'll show you in an example, but I Want to go through how we're going to do it? First is we have A. So I would play the fifth fret on the top string and ring my A string below it. The next thing would be the fifth fret on the A string is a D note. And guess what? The string below it is a D. So you'd hear it sounds the same. The string below that, the D string. We're also going to play the fifth fret. Okay. And that's a G note, because the third string below is a G. Hear that? How it sounds the same? Now, this is where it gets a little weird. Because there's no B sharp. We kind of have like a little weird interval here. For the G string, we have to play the fourth fret because that's the B note.

Hear that?

And then the B string, you would go back to the fifth fret, which is the E note. And that even sounds a little bit off to my ear. Just a little bit. So we have the fifth fret, fifth fret, fifth fret, fourth fret, fifth fret. Hope you guys are enjoying this lesson. If you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, make sure to do that. Let's get back into the lesson. So what I'm going to do is I think my E is out just a little bit, so I'm really going to put it out. Hear this. You're going to hear what we call dissonance.

It doesn't sound very good at all. Right. And I always think when you're doing this, it's easier to tune below the pitch and then come up to pitch versus tuning above the pitch and coming down. I don't know why my ear works better that way, but. So I'm below the pitch here. So what I'm going to try and do.

There it is. See? And that sounds much better than it did before. This means you have to work a little bit on your ear. I'm a singer, so I have a slight advantage. So I sung the pitch.

And I was able to go up to pitch. For some people, you have to. It's kind of like a weird thing. You have to hold the pitch.

Tune it, do it again.

And you'll hear. And you just kind of go back and forth. There it is.

You'll know because it sounds good. If it's not right, even if it's slightly off.

There'S like this wobble you hear between the strings. That's the dissonance. I mean, it's closed, but it's not spot on.

Did you Hear that? I don't know if you can hear it. It kind of springs into place when you get it on the right pitch.

Hear it? It goes kind of. Oh, it's even still just a little bit off.

Now. I think I'm too high. No, no.

There we go. It's just a hair sharp. A hair sharp. Now, see, my ear is good. I can hear that. And I will admit wholeheartedly, my ear is probably one of my weakest things as a player. Am I sight reading? I'm horrible at sight reading other than rhythm. I'm good at sight reading rhythm, but I'm horrible at sight reading. So when you first do this is kind of the other downside to tuning your guitar open like this is that if your ear is not good to hear the difference between those two pitches, you might be a hair sharp or hair flat. And if you do that on each string, watch. I'm going to do this. I'm going to just turn each of my tuning pegs just a hair.

I mean, it sounds decent, it's playable, but to someone like me, I can hear. Hear that there. This stuff is way off. Once again, to recap, top string, fifth fret with the open A and then fifth fret with the open D, fifth fret with the open G, fourth fret with the open B, fifth fret with the open E string. And that is how you tune your guitar without using a guitar tuner. And now that you know how to tune your guitar without a guitar tuner, YouTube's going to pop a couple more lessons up over here. Go check those out. And if you're interested, I do have an online guitar course where I teach you step by step how to play guitar. So go check that out laurenbateman.com course and I'll see you guys in another lesson video.