Strings and Tunings

Now we are going to talk about the strings, the neck and tuning the guitar. Knowing everything about these are essential to playing the instrument. So lets get started.

The strings

If you have the guitar in your lap and you are looking at the strings you will notice that they go from thick to thin. Well the strings are numbered, however they are sequentially numbered from the bottom string up to the top one. So the thinnest string on the bottom, closer to the floor than your head, is called the first string. Then of course they are numbered in sequential order as you go up, so the thickest top string would be the sixth string.

So what is the tuning of each string? Well the standard open guitar tuning is as follows:

• 6th string is E
• 5th string is A
• 4th string is D
• 3rd string is G
• 2nd string is B
• 1st string is E

One of the most important things you need to worry about is keeping your guitar in tune, especially on lower quality guitars. Every time you pick up your guitar for a practice session, you should tune it first. As a beginning guitarist, you want to also train your ear while you practice. Having a guitar that is slightly out of tune while playing or practicing can ruin your ear training!

There is nothing worse than getting used to and then not even noticing that your guitar is out of tune. To you, the guitar will sound fine but to everyone else they will hear how out of tune your playing is. So always make sure when ever you start playing that all the strings are in tune with each other.

So how do you tune the guitar? Well there are a variety of ways one could make sure their guitar is in tune. You could use a tuning fork, a piano, an electric guitar tuner and there is even software! However you will need to invest in one of these things to make sure you have something to tune your guitar with.

There is no way, unless you are gifted with perfect pitch, that you can tune your guitar perfectly in E without the use of one of the listed items.

The Neck

The guitar neck is divided by frets. You place your finger in between each fret and push the string down so that the string touches the metal fret. Once you pluck the string while doing this, you produce the note at that precise fret. The pitch of the guitar is lowest and goes up as you go up the fretboard towards the body of the guitar. So lets go deeper into how the pitches work on the fretboard.

As you move up the fret board each fret is a semitone, also known as a half tone, interval. If you were to play the 6th string open, the note would be E. However if you fret at the first fret, the note would be F. Then if you fret at the 2nd fret, the note would be F sharp.

This process continues for each fret until you reach the 12th fret on the neck, which is an octave of the open note. Of course this works exactly the same on all the strings below as well.

So the key point to remember is the tuning of the strings, each fret is a semi tone and you should have your guitar in tune at all times while you practice.