3 ways to tune your Ukulele

In this video, I'm going to show you 3 ways we can tune your ukulele. Any one of these 3 methods is fine, um, but the absolute best way, without doubt, is to have a clip-on tuner. There are so many available, many ukuleles actually come with a clip-on tuner. Um, this would be mine, which is a separate one. this is available individually, it's by TC Electronic. I use this for all my guitars and everything, and this also looks like Kit from Knight Rider, he's pretty cool. And what this does is it measures the vibration so that when we play a string. Uh, it's gonna tell us what note we're playing. I will leave a link to a separate video below this one on the page where this is embedded, uh, where I've, I've covered a full video of how we can do that. I wanna make you guys aware that we can also use free apps for this, and I'll talk you through those in one. Second, and we can also tune ukuleles by ear, though that is a more advanced skill and it's something that we don't want to over rely on. But I do want to show you a cool little trick of exactly how to do that. So absolute best way, support your ukulele how you know how. I'm just gonna pluck with my thumb just for this. And then we see that we have that G note there and those tuner notes are G, C, E, and ear. So the next string wants to be a C and we're a little bit low. Maybe pick, you know, pluck the string around 1 per second, you can pluck it more while you're, you know, getting it there, but around 1 per second what you find is sometimes it goes a little bit higher and then lower, that's because the string's vibrating, so around 1 per second to see where it evens out at. Next string. Uh And we want all green, so this side is too uh low, this side is too high, we're normally too low, strings don't tighten themselves. And then finally, the air. Sometimes, like that one was being a little bit fiddly though, it wasn't quite, I was turning the peg but we weren't quite getting a lot of movement. Come too low, and then back up to it. And there we go. One thing that will really help with that if that's a real struggle is just a little bit of pencil lead, literally draw on inside these grooves when you take the string out of the groove and draw in there with a little bit of pencil lead, it just makes it a little bit more slippery in there cos when we turn here, we need that string to move within here. That's a really top tip. My top recommended free app. At the time of making this video, there's actually one called Guitar Tuner, um, but this is also there for ukulele as well, I'll have to stop talking so that we can check that this is working. And there you can see that that G string is in tune cause I've just tuned it. The good thing here is it tells us which string that we're playing. And it gives us a little chi ching when it's near enough in tune. Let's just try uh string two. There we go, for example. Um, the best tuner app that I recommend, bar none, um, is the free boss one, cause I have this exact pedal in real life, it's in a drawer somewhere. Um, but this enables us to tune your ukulele to any notes that we want to tune it and it tells us the actual note that's playing, so if I stop talking one second. Now you can see we're playing that G. if I stop the other ones from ringing out. There you can see that I'm playing that G and it's showing the exact note that is written. This is the one that I use in the video, uh, that I will likely link to below, and that shows a fully comprehensive way of how to tune it with an app, and it also works the same as any clip-on tuner also. The final way we can tune your ukulele is by ear, but what we really need to know is we need to get one in tune. We or as close to in tune as possible, and it's best if we do that with string one. So make sure that is as close to an A as possible or as close to this as possible. What we can then do is check that that is in tune with the next string or get the next string in tune with that one. By playing the 5th fret, string 2. And we can hear that they're the same note, so we know that's in tune. We can then go to string 4. And they want to be close enough in tune. Which we can hear the there just about. And then finally for string 4 to check strings 4's in tune, it's the third fret of string 2. Before all my song tutorials and most of my videos, I'll make sure I do this. So that you can check your tuning with me, but if your ukulele ever goes out of tune, it is totally fine, you just need to tune it as quickly as possible, and typically that's with a clip-on tuner because they are the most accurate. You'll find more help further down this page. I hope you really enjoy this course guys, and I will see you in a later video.