Guitar 1: Tuning the Guitar by Ear

Electronic tuners and apps are pretty common and either inexpensive or free. I encourage you to get a hold of a tuner. They make your life so much easier when playing the guitar.
The problem with most tuners is that they train you to tune with your eyes and as musicians, we want to be able to use our ears to make decisions. It is an important skill to be able to tune your guitar by ear. Your guitar will go out of tune whether you have an electronic tuner or not. You need to be ready.

There is a common method for tuning the guitar to itself using your ear and a basic diagram of the neck of the guitar. I have included a video which demonstrates how to use this method.

image from lincolnschoolofmusic

1. Put your finger on the 5th fret of the low E string and that is an A note. Since the next string you are tuning to is an A, you would play both the notes at the same time, gently tuning the A string until its pitch matched the note you were fretting on the sixth string.

2. Once both notes were the same pitch, you would move to the next string and repeat the previous process. This time, fretting the 5th fret on the A string and playing the open note of the fourth string, D.

3. Repeat the same for the next string.

4. Be careful at this point! When fretting on the now tuned G string, you would place your finger on the 4th fret(not the 5th) to tune this string correctly.

5. The last string you would repeat the process you did for the first three strings.