Learning to Tune a Guitar

Keeping a guitar in tune can be quite a task, especially for beginning guitarists.  However, if you want to be a guitarist, it’s something you’ll have to tackle. My suggestion is to get a cheap tuner from Guitar Center or Musician’s Friend.  It should run you about fifteen dollars, which is money well spent.  After buying it, you’ll have to practice using it, and obviously, you’ll have to memorize the notes of the strings.  From lowest to highest sounding pitch, they are the following notes.

E A D G B E 

 

Fortunately, there’s also a mnemonic device to help you learn the names of the strings.

 

Eat All Day Get Big Easy

I realize that for beginning guitarists it’s a lot easier to hand a guitar to someone else to tune, but with continued practice, tuning a guitar gets easier and easier. 

Power Chords

One of the most important things to know when learning to play guitar are power chords.  For rock, metal, and punk musicians, power chords are the building blocks of songs.  Still, when talking to a beginning guitarist, I'm always surprised when I'm met with a perplexed look after mentioning power chords.  No, I'm not talking about that twenty foot orange cord connected to that table saw in the garage. Instead, we're talking about the most basic, but powerful guitar chord.  And it's only made up of two notes: the root and the fifth.

If you don't know those two terms, don't worry. They will become clear eventually. For now, you simply need to know that the "root" gives the letter name to the power chord. Take a look at the following power chords. They are usually played with your index finger and your ring finger. Some guitarists will also use their index finger and pinky. It's good to get comfortable fingering it both ways.

Practice these four chords again and again, because with these four little chords, you can literally play hundreds of songs.  And once you master them in this position, start moving the chord shape up and down the neck.   Each time you move it, you are changing the root note (the bottom note of the chord fingering in this case) and playing a different power chord. 

Happy picking!