How To Fine Tune Your Guitar With Snark Tuner

There are TWO distinct skills you must develop to advance your guitar playing, and you must develop BOTH skills at the same time!Show more

FIRST, you must be able to tune your guitar,

SECOND, you must be able to play the notes you want to hear.

It can be a frustrating paradox because you can’t develop either skill without the developing the other skill first! Therefore you should plan on spending a lot of time developing both skills every day. Your guitar is a precision instrument, and will require daily, highly skilled maintenance in order for it to play right. Temperature and humidity are constantly changing, and therefore your guitar is constantly changing, especially in climates with 4 distinct seasons.

The wood parts and the metal parts of your guitar react differently to changing climates, creating constantly changing (what i call “weird”) tensions in all parts of your guitar. These weird tensions must be relaxed, released, removed, and re-tensioned every day, or else you’ll have endless problems with weird noises and tuning stability as you play. Even if your guitar is perfectly in tune the night before, it will develop weird tension over-night.

Even if your guitar tuner shows you are still in tune the next day, it will be in a state of (what i call) “false tuned”. There will be weird tension in the wood, in the strings, where the strings cross the bridge saddles and nut, in the tremolo system, and especially around the tuning pegs.

Therefore, to relieve all this weird tension, you must loosen every string a little bit, which in turn releases the weird tension in the wood of the neck, and everywhere else. Once the weird tension is released from the strings and neck, you can re-apply string tension to strings and neck and you’ll have good, clean normal tensions.

You may have heard you always want to “tune UP” a string to pitch, but you really need to take that a few steps further and tune up ALL strings at the same time in a deliberate, systematic way. If you try to tune just ONE string down and back up, it just shifts the weird tension from one string to the strings and guitar parts, and you’ll wind up chasing your own tail trying to get rid of the weird tensions.

So follows these steps for a perfectly tuned guitar.

1) Wash and dry your hands. Set your guitar in the exact place you plan to play at least 30 minutes before playing, to acclimate guitar to ambient temperature. Don’t set guitar near a vent, or in sunlight, especially around dawn or dusk when temperatures are changing quickly

2) Guitar will also need to acclimate to your body temperature as you hold it, so just rough-tune it to start and then begin your warm-up routine, for about 30 minutes. You’ll know your guitar is acclimated to your body temperature once the guitar stops feeling cold on your belly. Once your guitar is acclimated to room temperature AND your body temperature, its time to fine-tune.

3) loosen all of the strings just a little bit.

4) tighten each tuning peg slightly until the gears positively engage and there is no sloppy gear lash.

5) The Snark tuner indicator needle will point left when the string is flat, and point right when the string is sharp, and point straight up when the string is in tune. Gently turn (I call it squeeze) each tuning peg slightly tighter until your tuner indicator needle starts to move toward the right. Do not try to tune up to pitch on the first squeeze. Leave each string just a few clicks flat.

6) As you tighten one string, the neck will move forward just a hair, you’ll notice the other strings go slightly loose/flat. While this can be very frustrating, just try to understand the mechanics of what is happening, and come to expect it, and just consider it a normal part of your warm-up routine, and your guitar tuning skill development.

7) Follow a torque-sequence type pattern. This means start with one string, and then tighten it a little bit, and then go to the next string, etc and tighten each string just a little bit.

8) Then return to the first string again, and tighten each string a little more, without ever going up to pitch, and definitely without going over pitch, or sharp! If you go sharp on any string, you may as well start over! On a good day, you should be able to get the guitar in tune by going over each string 3 times.

9) On your final pass, squeeze each string up to perfect pitch. Verify pitch of each string one last time. I like to say theres no feeling in the world quite like that of a fresh squeezed guitar...

10) turn OFF your Snark tuner to save battery.

11) remove Snark from guitar if you are concerned about your guitar finish and/or the extra weight on your headstock.

next video:

Rule 1, Rule 2, Rule 3 For Guitar Tuning Pegs, To Prevent Breaking Strings

https://rumble.com/vc4zu1-rule-1-rule-2-rule-3-for-guitar-tuning-pegs-to-prevent-breaking-strings.html