A Guitarwaze Guide To Tuning Your Guitar

We are almost ready to launch. Are you ready? Have you tuned your guitar? Time to tune up and get ready to learn.

Unless you possess the rare quality of absolute or perfect pitch you'll need a lot of practice to be able to hear whether each of your strings is tuned to the right note. Since this quality is so rare that only Mozart himself supposedly demonstrated this skill, we thought we'd give you a bit of guidance on how to get started.

How do you tune it? How do you know what it's supposed to sound like? Even if you do, can you get it right? The tiniest difference in sound can make chords sound terrible. Please, please do not play the guitar without tuning it first! For this, you'll need a tuner!

First of all, there are a few different types of tuners for various different needs, working on different technologies:

1) Chromatic Tuner

This is the most common type of tuner and comes in various forms. It allows you to tune every note, on the chromatic scale, individually (12 tones in between octaves)

2) Polyphonic Tuner

With this type of tuner you play all notes at once and it allows you to recognise which string is out of tune.

3) Strobe

The Strobe Tuner is the one commonly used by pros, as it is the most accurate type on the market. It works on a needle tuner that gives you a reference frequency for comparison with the musical note.

4) Microphone

This is the most inaccurate type of tuner, using an inbuilt microphone to record your note. Outside noise can easily interfere with the tuning process and it is not the most up to date type of tuner you'll find.

There are various different forms in which the different type of tuners are made:

1) Clip-on Tuner

These are very popular due to their sleek designs and ease of use. You simply clip them on to your headstock and let it pick up on the vibration of the instrument.

2) Pedal Tuner

This is a popular option for performing musicians as you can activate it with your pedal and tune the instrument in between songs swiftly. They are also a very accurate option.

3) Handheld Tuner

As the name already says, it is hand-held or just laid down in front of you. It is not terribly accurate as it works on a microphone and other noises could interfere. It is a perfectly good option for home use.

4) Rack-Tuner

This is quite a chunky piece of equipment considering we're just looking to tune the instrument. But the reason for this is that these tuners have a whole lot of other features that can come in handy. Check out this Korg Rack Tuner if you're interested in what they can do.

5) App Tuner

And finally, this is of course an extremely popular option as we always have our smartphones at hand, and of course the fact that there are hundreds of very cheap apps out there for this purpose. It is a perfectly good option and you'll find a number of very good apps out there. Even pros often have an app as an alternative when their more professional machines are not at hand. If you'd like some great advice on recommendable apps, we suggest to check out this list here.

This should give you a good idea of what's out there and what sort of tuner suits your needs.

So all that's left is to tune it up, tune in and stay tuned for our upcoming launch.