A guitar tuner is an amazing help to guitar players of all stages of expertise. Every guitar player should learn how to use a guitar tuner early in his career. They are small and compact and will come to your aid when your ear is too tired and emotional to tune your guitar with any accuracy. For many guitarists, tuning the guitar is more difficult than playing it, and a lot of time is wasted at gigs and during lessons trying to tune guitars by ear.

The notes on the open strings of the guitar are E A D G B E. Guitar tuners come in several different forms and perform the work of tuning guitars to varying degrees of completeness.

Although a guitar player tuning his guitar by ear might look cool, the fact is that nobody's ear is as good as a decent electronic tuner. You could forget all about trying to train your ear altogether and just make sure your guitar tuner goes everywhere that you and your guitar go.

An electronic guitar tuner tells the guitarist if the note he is playing on each open string of his guitar is at the correct frequency. Electronic guitar tuners can vary greatly in price but the most expensive is not necessarily the best. Some tuners are just LEDs you can carry on stage with you to tune your guitar on the fly, some tuners are able to tune many different instruments.

There are many guitar tuners available online that simply sound the notes that correspond to the open strings of the guitar and the guitar player has to use his ear to match his guitar to the sound of the tuner.

There are also tuners that are available as free downloads from the internet. Some of these have several different displays to help you tune your guitar accurately and some can tune to various alternate tunings. Learning how to use a guitar tuner of this type would be a good move for any learner guitarist.

Low priced guitar tuners that you can buy at music stores use a similar method but the difference is that the tuner also has a needle that will indicate how close your tuning is. There are slightly more expensive guitar tuners that do a similar job but have a better quality display.

There is a guitar tuner that clips onto the guitar and "feels" the vibrations coming through the guitar when the open strings are played. Although we can't hear the comparison with this kind of tuner, the result is a little better than with your basic LED display and getting to know how to use this kind of guitar tuner is a little easier.