How to tune your bass guitar

How to tune your bass

You’ve just bought a brand new bass and you’re excited to start playing. You find some great tutorials on YouTube and off you go, right? But once you start playing it just sounds off. The strings are out of tune and we need to learn how to tune them first!

Buy yourself a tuner, download a tuning app, or sit next to a piano if you want to do it by ear, and start with the low E string. If you want to go up in tuning, you need to turn the tuning key away from you and turn it towards you if you want to go down. Do this with all 4 strings and your bass will be in tune!

Hmmm, does this sound just a little bit too complicated to you? Well, it’s just a complicated thing to do. Some knowledge about notes and music theory is very useful to understand more of how tuning works.

Don’t worry! In this article, you’ll find all the details you need to know if you want to tune your bass as fast as possible.

Two types of tuners

There are basically two types of guitar tuners:

A clip-on guitar tuner that feels the vibrations of the wood and calculates the frequency the note is vibrating on (this one works for both acoustic and electric bass guitars).
A pedal tuner that records the frequency through a cable that you must plug in (this one only works with a jack cable).

Almost all tuners work the same way: the goal is to get the lights in the center and turn green. When you tune the E string, it should say E and turn green. When there are red lights on the right, the string is too sharp, and when the lights are on the left side, the string is flat.

SETTINGS OF YOUR TUNER

Some tuners allow you to adjust the frequency in which you are tuning. Most western music is in 440Hz, so most tuners have a single knob that can be pressed as often as you can until it will reach 440Hz.

Another detail of the tuners to be aware of is this: you can sometimes adjust the instrument you are tuning for. So “g” stands for guitar, “u” for ukulele, “b” for bass, “v” for violin, and “c” for chromatic. Chromatic means “every note in the 12-tone system” (we’ll get to that in just a little bit).

Tuning With Your Smartphone Or Tablet

When you are on a budget, or you just don’t want to spend any money on a tuner, you can of course still tune your bass with an app. There are multiple apps out there and most of them have a free version with paid upgrade features:

App: Fine Tuner

I’m using the app Fine Tuner here. The principle is the same: you need to get the black line right in the middle of the green triangle. When it’s on the left, it means you need to go higher in pitch and when it’s on the right you need to decrease the pitch of the string.

Although it’s great to have a free tuner with you at all times, I prefer to tune with a real tuner (clip or pedal). The tuners on our smart devices use a built-in microphone, so you can only tune when you are in a quiet room.

Let’s say that you are playing in front of an audience that talks a lot in between songs. The microphone might have some trouble picking up a clear signal and therefore it cannot indicate the tuning of your bass.

To conclude: it’s perfectly fine for amateur use at home, but for professional use, it’s better to just buy a tuner.

12 Note System

Before I explain to you the names of all the 4 strings, I would like to teach you something about the 12 note system, because it will be of great use later on.

There are 12 notes in total and they are best explained by looking at a piano keyboard. There we have 7 white keys and 5 black keys. We call the distance between each key a semitone, and if there is a key in between, we call it a tone or a whole tone.

The 7 white keys are easy to name: C D E F G A B. It’s just the 7 first letters of the alphabet, and once you get to the G, it repeats again from the beginning. So: A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G.

The tricky part is when we get to the 5 black keys. They can either be called sharp when approached from the left. So for instance: C turns into C sharp (C#).

But this same note can be approached from the other side: D turns into D flat (D♭)

Remembering this image above is essential if you want to tune the string when it’s a different note on the tuner. So save it to your downloads folder and set it as your wallpaper, or print it and hang it on the wall if you cannot remember. This cheat sheet will be very handy later on.

Eddy Ate Dynamite Goodbye

The names of the strings are E A D G. This is of course a weird combination of letters to remember if you’re not used to them, so there are several ways of remembering them. One of them is “Eddy Ate Dynamite Goodbye”.

Put your fretboard in front of you like this:

The most complicated thing for the beginner player is to realise that the “high” pitched strings are actually “down below” when your bass is resting on your lap, and the “low” pitched strings are above. This may be confusing at first, so I recommend looking at your neck like this with this picture to really understand what’s going on here.

Tuning With The Piano

The letters we use for the strings (EADG) represent real notes that can be found on the piano.

This method of tuning your bass might be a little bit advanced, but if your hearing is alright, you might be able to pull it off. But please bear in mind that tuning the strings by ear with a piano sometimes requires many years of ear training.

The only important thing I want you to know from this piano here is that the strings (EADG) don’t exist in a vacuum. They have their place on the 12-note spectrum, and this knowledge will come in handy for this next part.

What If There Is A Different Note On My Tuner?

So what do you do when you’re tuning your A string and all of the sudden it says A# instead of A. This means we need to go back to our cheat sheet.

We want our string to be an A, but it says A#, which means we need to go to the left. This means that the pitch of our string must be lowered. In order to do that you need to move the tuning know towards yourself until the # sign is removed.

Once there is only a single A without a # or ♭ sign you can turn the tuning knob until your tuner turns green.

Final Thoughts

Well, I hope you’ve found all of your answers in this article. Tuning your bass is something you’ve probably never thought of before you started playing. But it is something that you’re going to do a lot of as a bass player.

Don’t be discouraged in the beginning if it’s going too slow. Ask somebody that can do it for you in person. Maybe there is someone you know, or you could ask your local guitar store employee to do it for you, and pay close attention to how they are doing it.

But the more you do it yourself, the better and faster you’ll get at it.

How to tune your bass guitar