Guitar tunings
the assigning of pitches to open strings of guitars
Guitar tunings are the assignment of pitches to the open strings of guitars, including classical guitars, acoustic guitars, and electric guitars. Tunings are described by the particular pitches that are made by notes in Western music. By convention, the notes are ordered and arranged from the lowest-pitched string (i.e., the deepest bass-sounding note) to the highest-pitched string (i.e., the highest sounding note), or the thickest string to thinnest, or the lowest frequency to the highest. This sometimes confuses beginner guitarists, since the highest-pitched string is referred to as the 1st string, and the lowest-pitched is the 6th string.
Standard tuning defines the string pitches as E (82.41 Hz), A (110 Hz), D (146.83 Hz), G (196 Hz), B (246.94 Hz), and E (329.63 Hz), from the lowest pitch (low E2) to the highest pitch (high E4). Standard tuning is used by most guitarists, and frequently used tunings can be understood as variations on standard tuning. To aid in memorising these notes, mnemonics are used, for example, Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie.
The term guitar tunings may refer to pitch sets other than standard tuning, also called nonstandard, alternative, or alternate. There are hundreds of these tunings, often with small variants of established tunings. Communities of guitarists who share a common musical tradition often use the same or similar tuning styles.
The public source identifies “Guitar tunings” as the assigning of pitches to open strings of guitars. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Guitar, tunings and assigning.
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This entry incorporates text from “Guitar tunings” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.