Ear Fusion Guitar Lessons - How To Play By Ear
Tuning
your guitar
When tuning our guitar, you can tune it to itself, which
is a good idea, because you want all the notes on each string to be
in tune with notes on the other strings. It is important when
learning songs by ear that your guitar is tuned to concert pitch.
Concert pitch is the standard for musical instruments…where the A
note (played by the second string open) is exactly 440 Hz…which is
the frequency of the sound wave produced by what we call the A note.
Without this standard tuning…most music would likely be hard
to follow by ear. You can tune your guitar to the concert pitch one
of several ways. An electronic guitar tuner is the easiest way to
tune your guitar to concert pitch, but don’t let it stand in the way
of your natural hearing ability. Once you develop a good enough ear,
you won’t need a tuner most of the time. You can also use a tuning
fork or pipes to match your guitar to concert pitch. Each string is
a different note as shown in figure 2. Once you’ve managed to tune
at least one string to concert pitch, then you can tune the rest of
your strings from that by matching notes from one string to the
next. In figure 2, we see how the notes match from one string to the
next. You can see in the diagram that the second string to the
bottom is an A string. The note produced by the 5th fret
on the low E string is also an A note. You can tune your guitar by
making sure that the notes of each string match as follows:
FIGURE 2
There is also a “balance” called “intonation”. Intonation determines
how well tuned your guitar will sound when being played on lower and
higher frets areas. You’ll eventually want to use more advanced
tuning techniques as you mature into a more experienced player. It
takes time to really develop good tuning skills, so if you don’t get
it right the first couple or few tries…keep working at it…and,
unless you’re deaf, a breakthrough will come, for others you might
not have big trouble tuning up, especially if you have played any
other instruments. Just remember that the notes on any instrument
are the same, the only difference is the timbers and resonating
“qualities” of the tones. For instance, the same C note can be
played on a piano and the note can ring out nice and smooth, while
on an electric guitar the same pitch C note can sound loud, raspy or
heavily distorted.
So, as you can see in the diagram Figure 2, if you know you have the
low E at concert pitch E, then you can play the 5th fret
and you would have an A note which is what your second string should
produce when tuned properly and played open. So, just match up the
open second string to the first string played on the 5th
fret. The rest of the strings match up the same way, except when you
match the fifth string (B) to the B note on the fourth string (G).
You need to fret the 4th string on the 4th
fret, and then when you tune the last string from the 5th
string you go back to the 5th fret. You’ll see the light
on the why and how of all this soon enough…for now just follow
instructions and follow through.
Next - Lesson #6 - The Twelve Tones
