1. Gear

Things You Need:

  • Guitar: If you can, borrow a friend’s or find a free one on Craigslist. To start you just need a guitar that you can finger notes on, and that you can tune and will stay in tune.
  • Tuning device (optional): tuners come in different forms – pedals, smart phone apps, clip-on. We discuss ways to tune without these in the video. It is a good idea to at least get a free smart phone app to help you out. Tune often!

Core Topics:

  • Tuning the guitar: nothing is more important than playing in tune. The easiest way to tune is with a device. It is essential that you can tune by ear, however, so we will start there.
  • Tuning Pitch Standards: if and when you play with other musicians, you all need to be tuned to the same pitches – just because your guitar is in tune with itself doesn’t mean it is in tune with other instruments. The generally agreed standard is A 440Hz. Most of the tools for tuning discussed above will be tuned to that standard and may allow you to change it. If you are playing with friends and you don’t seem to be in tune with each other, try tuning from the same tuner – cheap tuners can be off of the standard by enough to hear.

Deeper:

  • Alternate Tunings: there are an endless number of other ways to tune your guitar. Each provide different sounds and fingerings, and will affect the way you play and sound. Here’s some good links to explore if you’re interested, or do your own searches:
  • Down Tuning: if you are into “heavy” music, you will come across this pretty quickly. Most of the time down tuning is about tuning the guitar in the same standard way but to different standard notes. For example, starting with Eb, D, C, or even B as the lowest note. People like Hendrix and Stevie Ray would often down tune to Eb both to get a spongier feeling to the guitar and also to help move songs to a more comfortable vocal range. Heavy bands feel that the down tuning sounds more aggressive, but that’s up for debate. Down tuning makes a big difference to the sound of the instrument, the guitar will usually need to be set up differently too. Here’s a good introduction video, you’ll find lots more content out there.
  • Guitar Intonation: you will notice that the tuning methods covered above involve tuning each string to a certain note. That will mean the particular note is in tune, but what about notes on the same string that you play in different places up and down the neck? This gets complicated. The simple explanation is that a guitar that is properly made and setup will be in tune up and down the neck, and making sure of this is a major part of a common guitar setup.  If you notice that things start sounded less “in tune” as you play on different parts of the neck even after you have tuned, you may want to look into how to set your guitar’s intonation. This is a simple process – if you can hear that you have a problem, you should learn how to solve it yourself. Search for “guitar intonation”, here’s a good link to get you started: Guitar Intonation Setup
  • 440 vs 432: the standard of the note A being 440Hz was agreed upon in the 1900’s. Many feel that other standards, such as A 432Hz, are more agreeable.
  • Guitar Maintenance/Setup: if your guitar is not properly set up and maintained it won’t play well, and will often sound off even if “in tune”. Once you have some simple chords under your fingers and are playing songs, you should consider taking your guitar into a local luthier for a general setup – poorly setup guitars are difficult to play, getting it set up can be the quickest way to sounding better and improving faster. Guitar setup is a career in itself, and there is a ton of content online if you want to dive in. Here’s some fun links if you’re interested:
  • Gear:  If you stick with playing guitar you may become enraptured by all the shiny toys available for you to spend your hard earned income on. Be careful, some people end up paying more attention to the things they own than the music they should be creating. There are lots of gear channels to choose from, here’s a few of my favourites:

< Previous Big Idea      Next Big Idea >

More links for Gear: