A guitar is a stringed instrument
whose six strings are plucked or strummed with a pick or fingers, either in groups, all at once, or one at a time. In certain cases, fingernails both real and artificial can be used in place of a pick.
A guitar is also a fretted instrument,
meaning it has many thin, metal bars all up and down its neck at specific distances which are seated perfectly perpendicular to it called frets. These frets allow your fingers to hold a string down behind one, shorten its length, and make it possible for the string to vibrate at specific pitches.
A guitar is also a mechanical instrument.
Depending on the type, it can consist of many devices which hold and retain the strings, apply and relieve various tensions and stresses on them, adjust their tuning, adjust the curve and taper of the neck, and sometimes other more advanced purposes.
Finally, depending on the type of guitar it can be an electric instrument.
In this case, the vibration of the strings is not amplified so much by the body of the guitar, but by magnetic pickups which convert that vibration into an electrical signal. This opens up a broad spectrum of sounds that can be created by the guitar through tone controls, effect pedals, and amplifiers.
Every guitar has strings.
Six of them, to be precise. Some will have more but it’s very rare to have less.
Every guitar has frets.
They’re thin metal bars that criss-cross the neck at fixed points. When a finger presses a string to one, it shortens the string and causes it to sound out a different pitch. Compared to fretless stringed instruments, the notes that frets produce are clear, clean, and consistently in tune.
Every guitar has a neck and a body.
The neck is long and thin, and it’s the area of the guitar where notes and chords are fretted. The body is usually larger and more dense, and it’s the area of the guitar where notes and chords are plucked or strummed. Some guitars carve the neck and body from the same material. On others, the neck and body are separately-carved pieces that are bolted together.
Every guitar has a nut and a bridge.
The nut is made of plastic, bone, or metal and holds the strings in place near the headstock. The bridge is made of plastic, bone, or metal and holds the strings near the base of the body. The strings vibrate between these two points, and in some cases adjusting each of them can drastically change the playability of a given guitar.
Every guitar has tuning machines.
Each string is wound around a post and a worm-drive gear crank is used to tighten or loosen them to make a specific pitch. Tuning machines are almost always made of metal.
Every guitar has a sound and a feel.
These are subjective qualities that depend on a lot of different factors – some that depend on the actual characteristics of the guitar and some that are more psychological for the player. How a guitar is set up, how heavy or light it is, its tuning, the type of strings it uses, whether it’s acoustic or electric, and many more variables can feed into that.
If you’re not careful, you can get tripped up by terminology when talking about or reading about the guitar. Here are some quirks of guitar lingo that you’ll just need to accept:
We will begin teaching how to play from the framework of a standard guitar.
A standard guitar consists of six strings, numbered 6 down to 1 from thickest to thinnest. You can also think of the order being from lowest-pitched to highest-pitched.
A standard guitar’s six strings will be tuned as follows:
This tuning is considered standard tuning, or “E standard.”
Almost all music written for the guitar is composed in standard tuning. Therefore, one of the best things a beginning guitarist can learn to do is to tune their guitar to this standard.
A standard guitar has six strings, and each of these six strings has an associated tuning peg that it will run through at the headstock, either in a slot or hole.
From there, each peg has a knob which the player can tighten or loosen with their fingers to change the pitch of the string. The knobs follow a typical “righty tighty, lefty loosey” convention, whether they’re all on one side of the headstock or not.
Strings behave in predictable ways. When they tighten, they rise in pitch. When they loosen, they lower in pitch. Each string on a guitar can be tightened or loosened within a certain range before it either becomes so tight that it snaps or so loose that it fails to vibrate at all when plucked.
The pitches of each string in standard tuning fall somewhere between these extremes, and ideally the whole instrument should feel comfortable and balanced when they’re in tune.
However, it’s impossible to tune a guitar by feel alone. Being “in tune” or “out of tune” requires a point of comparison.
This point of comparison could come from a number of different places:
The first two list items are examples of relative tuning. You can use these to bring your guitar in tune relative to these other sources, but the resulting pitches might not be the exact correct frequencies of their scientifically-measured notes.
By contrast, the last two list items are examples of absolute tuning. When you use these to tune your guitar, the strings will be as close to the scientifically-defined pitches of their respective notes as possible.
It's important to learn both approaches to tuning your guitar, but relative tuning is by far the more useful of the two. Not only will it teach you about music theory, how your guitar works, and how to listen critically to the sounds it makes, it'll also ensure you can get in tune with anyone, anywhere, at any time, with or without an electronic tuner on hand.
Note
A musical pitch. Any, really, but all western ideas of melody and harmony are based on 12 distinct notes, each one spaced equally from the other in pitch and cyclically repeating as they go up or down.
Interval
A unit of musical distance, either up or down to some target note from some reference note. For the sake of simplicity while learning to tune our guitar, this term means two notes played at the same time on two different strings. In general, it describes the relationship between any two notes.
Beats
A slang term for the audible effect of two notes of any interval being out of tune with one another, which sounds like an uncomfortable fluttering or "beating." It's the result of two sound waves combining and canceling each other out at regular intervals. The more beats you hear while sounding an interval, the more out of tune that interval is. An interval that does not beat is perfectly in tune with itself.
By knowing what notes make up standard tuning, understanding what interval apart pairs of strings should be, and recognizing when two out of tune strings are beating against one another, we can very quickly and easily tune a guitar by ear with no tuner required.
This system has three benefits:
This is the layout of a piano keyboard. It's one of the most commonly used images in teaching notes and music theory, but it isn't very useful for understanding guitar for three reasons:
Ear training is a perceptual exercise, and because each person’s sensitivity of perception is different it is nearly impossible to put into words a method for identifying beats that will work for everyone. However, the following example is given as one of many methods you could use:
So far, we've proven four important things about notes and intervals, and how they relate to tuning a guitar:
Based on these four established facts, we can work out a method for tuning any guitar to standard by ear using only fourths, octaves, and our ability to listen for beats.
Something you might have picked up on is that our method for tuning a guitar by ear doesn't involve using the 3rd and 2nd strings as a pair.
That's because these strings are "G" and "B" in standard tuning, which are a major third apart and thus not a perfect interval.
Now, in music theory terms, we label certain intervals "perfect" because of how they should ideally sound perfectly in tune in the context of our western music system. But the truth is, any interval can be made perfectly in tune with itself – even the major third. If you focus really hard on eliminating the beats between the 3rd and 2nd strings on your guitar, you'll get what we call a pure major third or a just major third. "Just" in this context refers to just intonation, which is another tuning system related to modern music theory that you really don't need to bother yourself with for a simple guitar lesson.
Pure intervals on open strings sound really, really, nice – especially on guitar, and especially when that guitar is heavy and loud. But the tradeoff is that at least one of the other perfect interval pairs of strings will be compromised. Sometimes, that tradeoff is worth it. Other times, it isn't.
Herein lies the bad news about tuning guitars: guitars are never perfectly in tune, even with themselves. The real nuance to tuning by ear is knowing when it's appropriate to be as dead-to-rails in tune with yourself as possible, and when to let it slide a little.
There is no more common or solvable electrical issue for a guitar to have than a bad ground.
But first, what is a ground?
You can look up a technical definition somewhere else or look to one of my forthcoming lessons on analog audio and electronics if you want to truly understand it, but for the purposes of how it relates to the guitar, here's my definition:
A ground is an electrical anchor point. If an electrical circuit doesn't have a ground, it doesn't have an anchor point, and weird things can happen to it. In the case of a guitar, we'll get a bunch of hum, buzzing, and general noisiness.
The most obvious place to have a ground on a guitar is on the sleeve of the output jack. If that isn't connected to at least something inside your guitar, you just won't get any signal.
But it's not enough to just connect that sleeve to something. Every metal part of our guitar has to somehow be connected back to it for everything to be properly "grounded."
Thankfully, most guitars make this pretty easy because the majority of the electronics on a guitar are all mounted to a common plate, and the underside of that plate usually has some kind of metal foil taped onto it, thus connecting all of the metal components together without the need for extra wires. There will also usually be a hole drilled in the body of the guitar for another small wire to snake through and out underneath the metal bridge, where it makes contact with the bridge, the strings, and the tuners. Remember, any metal object that is touching any other metal object that is also grounded, is itself grounded.
Confused yet? Just connect every metal thing to every other metal thing and you're good.
Nine times out of ten, when we hear unwanted buzzing or noise in our guitars, at least one metal object in the guitar has accidentally come un-grounded, and it's just a matter of zapping it with a soldering iron to re-form that connection.
There's a pretty easy way to tell this is happening, too. Take your hands off your guitar while it's plugged in, then touch any metal part of it and listen for any changes. If the buzzing goes away, congratulations! You just found a ground issue...because your body became the ground.
This is a neat little trick, but it also demonstrates why having your electronics properly grounded can be a very, very important thing. The voltages and currents a guitar puts out are microscopic – they'll never hurt you. But if another, more powerful part of your audio setup like an amplifier or powered microphone isn't properly grounded, that same thing can happen to you and hurt a lot – even kill you. So it's very, very important to ensure that every piece of equipment you're using, not just your guitar, is properly grounded for both noise reduction and harm reduction purposes.
But this is very important – as soon as you think there could be a grounding issue on ANY other equipment you own that takes more power than a 9v battery, STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING, TURN THE EQUIPMENT OFF, AND TAKE IT TO A PROFESSIONAL. No project is worth your life.
A lot of well-meaning players having issues with their guitar's grounding get nervous about fixing it themselves for fear of creating something called a "ground loop."
Ground loops absolutely happen unintentionally when we're working on electronics, but only in active circuits – that is, circuits that require power to work.
The vast, vast majority of guitars you'll ever play in your life have all passive electronics in them. Magnetic pickups, mechanical switches, pots, capacitors, resistors, etc. So you almost never need to worry about accidentally creating a ground loop. Just make sure that every metal part of your guitar is somehow wired to every other metal part of your guitar, and you're almost always good.
Can you mess that up? Sure, you can be bad at soldering or use faulty wires or wire stuff in reverse on accident. But the problem is never going to be "I created a ground loop in my guitar." Hope that helps.