Tuning a Guitar

Tuning a guitar is not always as easy as you think. A lot of electric guitar amps and pedals now come with built in tuners which are extremely helpful. If you have an acoustic guitar I would definitely recommend buying a guitar tuner for about 10$ from a guitar shop. Korg actually makes a very nice acoustic guitar tuner. Before you actually tune the guitar you must be familiar with certain guitar tunings. The most common are "Standard E", "Drop-D", and "E Half Step Down". All of these tunings are based off of E Standard Tuning. There are many other tunings out there that people play in. There's: Open G (keith richards loves this one, some say he's a closet banjo player), C (for heavy metal, metal and harder music), double drop D (E standard with both E's Tuned down to D) and many more.

Here's a list of all the tunings from above along with a bunch of other tunings that are fun to play around with

There are many ways to tune a guitar by ear

Everyone has their own unique way that works for them. I even have my own unique way (in Standard E tuning), I tune my guitar using the intro riffs from the Bob Marley redemption song and Greenday's good riddance. Both of these songs have opening guitar riffs that have been implanted inside my mind due to learning how to play the song or hearing it 5,000 times on the radio. The opening Redemption song riff is classic and it involves the E A and D string.... 3 strings taken care of... Then as I move to tuning the last 3 strings G B and E I play the intro from Good Riddance and tune the guitar to the proper notes by ear. That right there tunes the whole guitar. Find your own songs and learn how to tune the guitar on your own using my technique. 

The more common way to tune a guitar..

The more common way to tune a guitar is to know what an E sounds like from memory, then tune each string to that 6th string E. If you pluck the 5th fret of the 6th string you'll get the open note on the 5th string and if you pluck the 5th fret on the fifth string, you'll get the open note on the fourth string, and so on... The only exception to tuning this way is that when plucking the G string to tune the B string, you must pluck the fourth fret instead of the fifth due to the way the E standard tuning is. Aside from that, compare the sounds of each string and tune them appropriately. 

Tuning a guitar comes with practice

Its very important always have your guitar properly tuned, it tends to help out with your ear development. I definitely recommend getting an electronic tuner so you can check yourself and see if your tuning properly. You can also use various web sites to tune your guitar, however I find that the tones of the notes that they give you sound very midi like and its very hard to tune a real guitar to a midi tone. 

Here's some links to online guitar tuners.... 

Tuner and Great video on stringing a guitar 
http://www.gieson.com/Library/projects/utilities/tuner/  

Pretty nice tuner 
http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/onlinetuner.html  


Little bit hard to see due to the size, but it works 
http://www.dreadscott.com/Guitar.html