How to tune a guitar with your phone: a complete beginner guide

First: the names of the six strings

Strings are numbered from the thickest, so the sixth is the fattest and the first is the thinnest. In standard tuning they are:

Most people memorise it as "EADGBE".

• 6th string (thickest) — E
• 5th string — A
• 4th string — D
• 3rd string — G
• 2nd string — B
• 1st string (thinnest) — E

The order to tune in

Do this somewhere quiet. A television or music playing nearby will feed the microphone the wrong sound.

• Open the tuner and allow microphone access
• Start at the sixth string, damping the others so only one rings
• Check that the note shown matches the target
• If the gauge sits left (flat), tighten the peg; if it sits right (sharp), loosen it
• When it settles near the centre, move to the next string
• After all six, go back and check from the start again

What is a "cent"?

A cent is a fine unit of pitch. There are a hundred cents in a semitone, so five cents is a very small difference.

Within about ±5 cents counts as in tune. The human ear struggles to hear finer than that, and simply fretting a note firmly can move the pitch by that much.

One warning. Some tuners report your error against the nearest semitone rather than the string you are tuning. That means you can wind a G string all the way up to an A and still see "in tune" — right note name, wrong string. A tuner that measures against the target string is safer for beginners.

Why it keeps slipping out of tune

If it drifts within ten minutes, it is usually one of these.

• New strings — fresh strings stretch for a few days. This is normal; just retune often
• Strings wound badly at the peg — loose coils tighten while you play and the pitch drops
• Temperature or humidity changed — wood and metal move together. Let the guitar settle after coming indoors
• You tuned downward without overshooting — when lowering a string, go slightly below the target and come back up. It holds better

No tuner? The fifth-fret method

You can tune the guitar to itself by matching each string to the one above it.

The sixth string at the fifth fret should match the open fifth string, and so on down. The second string is the one exception: it uses the fourth fret.

This only makes the guitar consistent with itself. If your reference string is off, everything is off together. It is fine alone but use a real tuner before playing with anyone else.

• 6th string, 5th fret = open 5th string
• 5th string, 5th fret = open 4th string
• 4th string, 5th fret = open 3rd string
• 3rd string, 4th fret = open 2nd string (this one is the 4th fret)
• 2nd string, 5th fret = open 1st string

In short

Thirty seconds before you practise is all it takes. Playing an in-tune instrument makes your ear develop far faster from the same practice.

Chordwise includes a tuner for standard EADGBE tuning. It shows which string you are closest to and how many cents off you are from that string, so you cannot mistakenly tune one string to another note and see "in tune". Audio is analysed on your device and never recorded or transmitted.