How do you teach your kids to tune?

[nafmeadmin]

How can I effectively teach my seventh-graders to tune their own guitars? I’m willing to invest in electronic tuners. What procedures do you use so that the tuners aren’t affected by classroom noise? Do you start with just a couple of strings? I’d like to put an interactive tuner up on my Smartboard to demonstrate the procedure to my whole class before letting them do it on their own. Thanks!

[nafmeadmin]

The best tuners to buy for your guitar students are the clip-on type. They will pick up only the guitar it’s hooked on to so you don’t have to worry about keeping the class quiet.
When tuning another way for students to “hear” only their guitar is to have them lean their head to the left and place their ear on the side of the upper bout (shoulder) of the guitar.

[nafmeadmin]

That is very valuable information, since the tuners I’m currently using aren’t clip-ons; I didn’t know the clip-ons allowed you to tune in the midst of ‘traffic.’ BTW, mccarthyg786, thanks for posting the guitar ensemble website link. I’m treating myself to lessons this year, and an arrangement of ‘Yesterday’ from that site was a perfect complement to what I’m currently doing in my lessons. I really like the fact that guitar has its own forum.

[nafmeadmin]

To halsellm029: Have you taken one of the Teaching Guitar Workshops co-sponsored by NAfME? You will receive quite a stack of music (Guitar Ensembles included) when you attend. More info: http://www.guitaredunet.org

[nafmeadmin]

Good article on the subject: http://www.guitaredunet.org/teaching-tuning/

[nafmeadmin]

I agree with that article!

[nafmeadmin]

Clip ons are the only way to go. The Korg Pitchclip tuners work great for me. They work with violins and other strings as well. I have found it is a poor use of time to try and get students to tune by ear in the early stages of playing. Their ear is not trained well enough yet for matching pitch and they just won’t sound good. (Not to mention that they WILL break strings.) Students can be trained to use a clip on tuner very quickly, can pass them down the row and move on to PLAYING much faster.

[nafmeadmin]

The best tuners I have found are the pitch clips by korg. Though I have found it very useful to teach the students to learn to tune the guitar off of hearing the fourths, or by using the harmonics. They can simply use the tuner to find the 6th string E, or should they play other I instruments gettin then used to hearing and being able to recreat the A first can be useful for other studies.

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