Hey everybody. It’s Aaron. One of the really prevalent questions that I’ve been getting form the time I started the lessons is, questions about tuning. How do you get to certain tunings, how do you do this, how do you do that? Kind of some quick and dirty ways to get to some of the certain tunings, alright. A lot of the songs that I teach are in half step down tuning. If you’ve seen the video that I have the lesson I’m talking about the capo, which is what this is, you already have known that you can take your capo, put it on the first fret, tune your guitar to standard tuning… and once your guitar is in standard tuning with the capo on the first fret, E, A, D, G, B, E, as soon as you take the capo off, each of these frets, each of the strings is going to be lowered one fret. It’s going to be lowered a half step because as you lengthen the strings, they slow down. The vibrations slow down. Okay basically that’s what’s breezing the sound is. When you play an E… on the string, it’s 440 Hertz. I mean the vibration is 440 times per second, ok.
This A string is a little bit different thickness. When you play it, it rotates; it vibrates 440 Hertz per second. I think, yeah I think it’s 440 Hertz per second; 440 Hertz which is Hertz is vibration per second. I think so, anyway. Alright, the D string is a little bit different thickness… same thing, 440, alright. Now what you do is, every time you play a note. So we’re on the D string, or in the E string you play open… 440… as you shorten it, it vibrates faster and faster… and the faster it vibrates, the higher the pitch gets, alright? So for every half step, you go up… you’re shortening the string… and it’s speeding up… And as it shortens the strings, it speeds up your pitch rate so if you think about it logically, your capo is on the first fret, and you’re in standard tuning, on this top string which should be an E… now whenever you put the capo on, you’re going to have to play the note, and you’re going to have to turn your tuning knob alright… play the note, turn your tuning knob until you can get up to E, I’m sorry until you get down to E because you have to loosen the string.
Now, once this is standard tuning, ok. So once this string is an E with your capo on the fist fret, you’re going to take this off. As you take it off, it’s going to lengthen the amount of string. It’s vibrating because it takes the pressure off here… and since it lengthens it, it’s going to lower the pitch of the note, alright. So you’re going to be from the E that you were with a capo on first fret, to Eb, alright? Same thing if you want to go full step down. Put the capo on the second fret, tune your guitar E, A, D, G, B, E, take it off, full step down.
Some of the other tunings that are very common is drop D, alright? And the easy way to get to drop D is your third string down from the top is what? The D string, alright. The way I usually do it, from standard to go to drop D, I’ll play this D string, and I’ll play the low E at the same time. Pick them together, and then as I pick them together… you just turn this tuning knob on your low E down. Ok, so now… and you can hear them, you can hear them once they match up. So we’re going to go back up… That’s good enough, alright. So you get your low E, and your D. You want to get to drop D so you play them together, and as you’re turning this tuning fork that controls this low E, turning it… until they match up perfectly… ok. Then once you’re there, you’re on drop D… anything you want to do on drop D.
Alright the way to get back up from drop D, if you don’t have a tuner, you want to figure out, how do I get back up. The neat thing about this, alright, is if you think about an E, and A, and the D, the G, each of those is five steps higher than the other, ok? So basically a way to do that is, if this lower string is tuned to a D now, and you want to get it back to an E…
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services