11/06/2013

Online Guitar Tuner

By Chad Zhou


Tuning an electric guitar should be done using a tuner. Consistently using an electric guitar tuner is one of the best practices that a beginning guitarist can follow. One way to understand the value of an electric guitar tuner is to look to professional guitarists. Most professional guitarists use an electric guitar tuner because they appreciate how important it is to be in tune and they understand that relying on an electric guitar tuner is the best way to get, and stay, in tune.

I played guitar for the first time when I was in college when a friend let me borrow his guitar. After a some time, the friend came over to look in on me. I strummed a few chords I had been practicing. He cringed. Because I had been playing so much, the instrument was out of tune, way out of tune. I had never played a musical instrument before so I lacked the ability to hear that the instrument had gone out of tune.

That's where an electronic guitar tuner comes in. The main function of an electronic tuner is to automatically determine the pitch a string is producing and to visibly indicate whether that pitch is sharp (high), flat (low), or "in tune."

Double Dropped Tunings: Have the sixth and first strings tuned down one full step.

Open Tunings: This is where a chord can be strummed without fretting or fingering the individual notes. This would be used typically when a slide is employed in styles such as steel guitar and bottleneck playing. These were the tunings employed in blues music that was so influential in moulding the music of artists such as Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones.

Many people, including myself, are fans of the late Davy Graham who was greatly travelled and used these influences in his guitar playing and writing. He is probably best known for DADGAD tuning which he used so he could play along with musicians in Morocco, even though it is essentially a Celtic tuning (the global power of music!). This in turn ended up influencing Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin on songs such as Kashmir.

Despite the good accuracy, there were a couple problems with the Peterson strobe tuners, however. First, they were just downright expensive. Second, the quality of the product was not always high. There are a number of stories on the web where people have bought these tuners and they stopped working in relatively short order.




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