I took my kids Christmas shopping with me, and their pre-planned reward for behaving was that they could each pick out a toy at Toys 'R Us (okay, so I'm desperate - but it worked!).
Lauren picked out a 'toy' guitar - she wants to be a rock star. She doesn't need lessons because she is fully capable of teaching herself. Hmmmm........ It was a sparkling pink six string guitar . . . with real strings . . . that needed to be tuned. Now we are in trouble, I thought. Ward and I are about as musically gifted as a Canada Goose at a Lune family sing-along. Not to be deterred, I popped open my laptop and did a Google search on "guitar tuning" - there were over 6 million hits! I chose one that had a video lesson on guitar tuning. Here goes....
"The easiest way to tune your guitar is with an electronic tuner..." DUH! If I had an electronic tuner, would I be on the internet at 10:30 at night with a pink guitar on my knee? Moving on.... let's try, Standard Guitar Tuning.
"You can get a tuning fork, this is an A tuning fork. The way you can tell that it is an A tuning fork is that it has an A-440 on it. 440 happens to be the tuning frequency of the string and that's how you know it's an A tuning fork. You can get these at any music store." WOW - they must have been sold out at Toys 'R Us.
Fine tuning my search on Google, I tried guitar tuning for dummies. Only 127,000 hits - not nearly as many dummies out there. Proud to be one of them! This was more like it - Tune Your Guitar to Itself, how hard could that be? I've paraphrased this method below.
To tune a guitar to itself, use the relative method - tune all the strings in relationship to each other. (Cool) Choose one string as the starting point — say, the 6th string (Is that from the top or the bottom?). Leave the pitch of that string as is; then tune all the other strings relative to that 6th string by using the fifth-fret method. (I am fretting all right!)
The fifth-fret method derives its name from the fact that you almost always play a string at the fifth fret and then compare the sound of that note to that of the next open string. You need to be careful, however, because the fourth fret (the fifth fret's jealous understudy) puts in a cameo appearance toward the end of the process.
English please!! Clearly, these particular dummies are pretty smart. I didn't have a hope.
I worked on that guitar for another hour or so..... and then went to bed. It didn't sound half bad.
The next morning, Lauren was playing her guitar upstairs in the hallway outside her room. I strolled by and noticed that she was turning all of the knobs that loosen and tighten the strings.
I panicked, "Lauren, what are you doing?" I stammered.
She didn't even look up, as she earnestly said, "I'm tuning it in to country."
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