Getting Attuned to Tuning

Please do not smash your guitar,
no matter how frustrating this is at first.
Unless you are Pete Townshend. In
which case, smash away!

Tuning is THE most important thing to master if you want to sound good on the guitar. It's also one of the most confounding when you're new to the instrument--even moreso if you're new to playing music altogether! It's hairy at first, but you'll get it eventually.

[Confidential to my Thursday night students--your teacher had first-day-of-school jitters and forgot to give you the handout on tuning she had so carefully prepared. 1000 pardons. But here's what you need to know...]

The quick and dirty way to tune your guitar is to buy an electric tuner. There are several types, they're pretty cheap and portable, and it's a fail-proof way to get all of your strings sounding the way they ought to without any stress. Some guitars have a built-in tuner, which is awfully convenient. But you can get ones that clip onto the headstock of the guitar or that you simply set in front of you on a music stand or in your lap. Regardless of the style of tuner, you'll pluck each individual string, and watch the tuner to see what it says. It'll usually give you some sort of dial, a plus or minus, or an up or down arrow that's telling you if the string is ringing too high (sharp) or too low (flat). You'll adjust the tuning pegs--tighter to make the sound higher, looser to make the sound lower--until you get the dial to line up right in the center. Using a tuner will help you train your ears to hear the right sounds and relationships too, so that you can eventually move onto...RELATIVE TUNING!

There are two easy ways to tune your guitar by listening. The first one I like to call "The Reality Show"--(and by that I mean I just made that name up as I was typing this). The name of this reality show is "Here Comes The Bride--on NBC":
Pluck your 6th string. Remember, that's the big fat one closest to your chin, otherwise known as your low E. Now pluck the 5th string--the next one down towards the floor, otherwise known as your A. When you play your E followed by you A, it should sound like the first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride". That's a relationship, or 'interval', known as a perfect 4th, if you really wanted to know.
If those two strings in that order don't sound like Here Comes the Bride, adjust your 5th string (A) until they do.

Notice I said to adjust your 5th string, not your 6th string. Leave your low E string alone. When you don't have a tuner (or teacher) handy to verify whether or not your E is really an E, it doesn't matter so long as you tune the rest of the string to that low one. Your guitar will at least produce the correct sound relationships, even if they aren't technically the right notes.
Once you've got your 6th and 5th strings sounding like Here Comes the Bride, move onto your 5th and 4th (D) string. Notice how you're playing different notes now, but the relationship--the interval--between them is the same (once you're in tune, that is). It still sounds like Here Comes the Bride, even though you're playing an A and a D instead of an E and an A. That's because A and D have the same musical relationship as the E and the A--a perfect 4th. Neato, eh?
Now you can move onto your 4th (D) and 3rd (G) strings and rinse/repeat this Bride business.

Here's where things get a wee bit tricky. Your 2nd string (B) messes up our Bridal system, because G and B are NOT in a perfect 4th relationship, goshdarnit! Instead, G and B have a relationship known as a Major Third. A Major Third sounds like the first two notes of "When the Saints Go Marching In" (the "Ohhh when..." bit). For me that's trickier to hear, so instead I use the NBC method to tune my B string. Play the 4th string (D), 2nd string (B), and 3rd string (G) in that order and you should have the NBC theme. If you don't, make adjustments to your B string accordingly. Remember, you've already tuned your D and your G, so if something sounds goofy with one of them, go back a few steps and do the Bride method again on those strings.
Once that's squared away, you can go back to the Bride method on the 2nd (B) and 1st (high E) strings, because those two have the same perfect 4th relationship that we've come to know and love--whew!

Now you should have a guitar that sounds like a guitar, and can produce pleasing chord sounds according the the shapes we've learned.

There's a second method of relative tuning by ear, which is a little trickier to explain by typing, but I'll do my best...
That perfect 4th relationship between the notes of the strings means that, for all the pairs of strings that sounds like Here Comes the Bride (6th and 5th; 5th and 4th; 4th and 3rd; 2nd and 1st) you can put your finger onto the 5th fret of the lower of the two strings (lower in terms of sound, NOT lower in terms of number or distance from your chin) in order to produce the same note as the open top string. So if you've got your finger on the 6th string, 5th fret, it should produce the same note when plucked as the 5th string all by itself. If it doesn't, make adjustments to the OPEN string until it matches the one you're pressing down on at the 5th fret.
Now that pesky B string goofs all of that up, so for the 3rd and 2nd string pairing, you'll need to place your finger on the 4th fret of the G string (3rd string) in order to match it to the open B (2nd) string. If it doesn't match, adjust your B string until it sounds like the G string when depressed at the 4th fret.

Got that? You will. I promise. And we'll spend time at the beginning of each class tuning up together so the whole band sounds good.