Ear training · Method · History

Tune it
without looking.

A tuner tells you the answer. Your ear tells you why the answer is right. Here is the method players used for four hundred years before there was a needle to watch — plus the strange, political story of how the world agreed that A is 440 vibrations a second.

Reference tones

Standard tuning · A = 440 Hz

Sound the six strings

Press a note, sing it back, then match your string to it

A pure sine is the easiest to match precisely, because there are no overtones to distract you. The plucked tone is closer to what you'll actually hear beside your own guitar. Learn on the sine, then check yourself against the string.

The fifth-fret method

The traditional way

Every string but one is tuned a perfect fourth above the string below it. Fret the lower string at the fifth fret and it produces exactly the note the next string should be sounding open. Tune the whole guitar to itself, from one trusted reference.

Fix the low EGet the sixth string right from a tuning fork, a reference tone, or a piano. Everything downstream inherits this note, so it has to be true.
Fifth fret of E gives you AFret the sixth string at the fifth fret and play it against the open fifth string. Turn the A peg until the wobble between them disappears.
Fifth fret of A gives you DSame move down the neck. Fifth fret of the fifth string matches the open fourth string.
Fifth fret of D gives you GFifth fret of the fourth string matches the open third string.
Fourth fret of G gives you BThe exception. The interval between the third and second strings is a major third, not a fourth, so you drop back one fret. Fourth fret of the G string matches the open B string. This is the step everyone forgets.
Fifth fret of B gives you high EBack to the fifth fret. Fifth fret of the second string matches the open first string.
Go back and checkTuning is a loop, not a line. Tightening a string pulls the neck and the bridge and puts the ones you already did slightly out. Run the whole sequence twice.

Where the notes meet

Amber dot — the fretted note you play. Teal ring — the open string you tune to match it. Note the single amber dot that sits one fret back: the G to B pair.

Listen for the beats

The skill the whole method rests on

When two notes are close but not identical, the sound swells and fades — a slow throb called beating. Its speed is exactly the difference between the two frequencies. Six beats a second means you are six hertz away. As you turn the peg, the throb slows down; when it stops entirely, you are in tune. You are not listening for a pitch. You are listening for the wobble to disappear.

Reference A2 · 110.00 Hz Your string 110.00 Hz Offset 0.0 ¢

0.0Beats per second

Drag your string out of tune

Two other checks worth knowing

Harmonics · Octaves

The harmonic method

Touch the sixth string lightly directly over the fifth fret — don't press — and pick. You get a clear bell tone two octaves above the open string. Do the same on the fifth string over the seventh fret. Those two harmonics are the same pitch, and because they ring on for several seconds while your hands are free, the beating between them is far easier to hear than two fretted notes.

The pairs are 5th fret against 7th fret on each neighbouring string, all the way up — with the same exception at the G and B strings, where you use the 4th fret harmonic against the 5th.

One caution: harmonics follow the pure mathematics of a vibrating string, while your frets are laid out for equal temperament, which is a compromise. Tuning entirely by harmonics leaves the guitar slightly out with itself, most audibly on the B string. Use harmonics to get close fast, then confirm with fretted notes and a chord.

The octave check

Once you've been round the strings, prove it. Play the open sixth string against the second string at the fifth fret — same note, two octaves apart. Then the open fifth against the third string at the second fret. Octaves are unforgiving: a two-cent error that hides inside a fourth will beat audibly inside an octave.

Finish with a chord rather than a note. Strum an open E, then a G, then a D. If one string sticks out as sour in one chord but fine in another, the problem is usually not tuning at all — it's intonation at the bridge, or a string that has gone dead and no longer plays true up the neck.

A guitar that is perfectly tuned to itself is still a guitar. The instrument is a compromise by design, and experienced players quietly tune the B string a couple of cents flat because it makes the open chords they use most sound sweeter.

Why 440?

A four-century argument

For most of the history of Western music there was no standard pitch at all. An A was whatever the local organ said it was, and organs were built to whatever the church could afford in pipe metal. Singers travelled with music transposed for the town they were visiting. Surviving tuning forks and organ pipes put historical A anywhere from roughly 373 Hz to over 500 Hz — a spread of more than three semitones.

1610s

Chorton and Kammerton. German churches keep two pitches at once: the organ's "choir pitch" and the softer "chamber pitch" of the instruments, often a whole tone apart. Bach wrote parts transposed to reconcile them.Roughly A 415–466 Hz depending on the town

1711

The pitch pipe arrives. John Shore, trumpeter to Handel, is credited with inventing the tuning fork — a portable reference that doesn't drift with temperature the way a pipe does. A fork associated with Handel measures about 422.5 Hz.A ≈ 422.5 Hz

1834

Stuttgart. A congress of physicists adopts 440 Hz, following the acoustician Johann Scheibler's measurements. It is the first serious attempt at an international standard — and it is almost entirely ignored by musicians.A = 440 Hz

1859

France legislates. A commission including Berlioz and Rossini sets diapason normal at A = 435 Hz and makes it French law. The motive is partly protective: orchestras had been creeping the pitch upward for brilliance, and singers were being wrecked by it.A = 435 Hz

1885

Vienna agrees, mostly. An international conference endorses 435. Britain and America drift anyway; American manufacturers settle around 440, partly because it made a convenient round number for the new business of mass-producing pianos.

1939

London. An international conference convened by the British Standards Institution recommends A = 440 Hz. Broadcasting, not orchestras, is the decisive force: radio needs a single pitch that every station and every recording can share.A = 440 Hz

1955

It becomes a standard. The International Organization for Standardization adopts 440 Hz as ISO 16, reaffirmed in 1975. It is now the reference behind every tuner, keyboard and DAW you will ever pick up.

Now

Nobody entirely obeys. Many European orchestras play at 442 or 443 for a brighter sound; the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics have sat as high as 445. Period-instrument ensembles play Baroque repertoire at 415 — almost exactly a semitone below 440, which is a practical joke of a coincidence, since it lets a modern harpsichordist transpose by shifting the keyboard.415 · 440 · 443

440 is not acoustically special. It won because it was written down at the moment radio made a shared pitch necessary.

And the 432 argument

You will run into the claim that 432 Hz is a natural or healing frequency that 440 replaced for sinister reasons. The historical part doesn't hold up: 440 was proposed in 1834 and settled by broadcast engineers and standards committees, and controlled listening studies haven't found the claimed effects. But there's a real thing underneath the myth — a whole record played a third of a semitone lower does sound slightly darker and more relaxed, and if you like how your guitar sits at 432, that is a perfectly good reason to tune there. The tuner on this site will take you anywhere from 415 to 466.

What matters far more than the number is that everyone in the room picks the same one.

Open the tuner and set your own reference pitch →