HOW TO... Tune Your Guitar Using Tuning Forks And Pitch Pipes

Another way to tune your guitar is to use either a tuning fork or a pitch pipe. Unlike tuning your guitar using online guitar tuners, this method requires you to purchase either a tuning fork or a pitch pipe. Personally, I don't have either of these, so I'll use show you pictures of how they each look like.

Tuning Fork
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What you see above is a picture of a tuning fork. The most common tuning fork you will find is the a440 tuning fork. A440 represents the note that the tuning fork will give you. In this case, it is an A note. There are of course other tuning forks that give you different notes, but this is the most common that you will find. You can find what note the tuning fork gives you by looking at the handle of it. It should be engraved on it.

To use the turning fork, all you have to do is hold it by the handle (above the circle-shaped portion at the bottom of the picture), make sure you don't touch the 2 vertical pole-like structures (because that is the part that will vibrate to give you the A note), and hit them on any hard surface.

Then, you can either do one of two things. First, you could either place the circle-shaped portion into your ear. This way, you will be able to hear the A note in your ear. Or, you could place the circle-shaped portion on the body of your guitar. This will vibrate the body of your guitar, resonating the A note from it.

After you hear the A note, you will then proceed to tune your 5th string to what you hear. Remember, the guitar is tuned in EADGBE. So tune your 5th string. After that, you can tune the rest of your strings using the 5th-fret method, which will be explained on another post.

Pitch Pipe
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Above is just an example of how a pitch pipe can look like. What you see from the picture (sorry it's quite small), are 6 different holes that you can blow into. Each of these holes are labeled based on each string of your guitar. So you will see something like E-1 (referring to your first string), B-2 and so on.

All you have to do now is to blow into each hole, and tune each string accordingly. Essentially, it's like using the online guitar tuner, except you can carry this small device anywhere you want.