I'm no expert on tuning
guitars, nor am I a great
guitar player. However I've been playing
flamenco for a number of years now, and as you probably already know, close to perfect tuning is essential when playing something as fast or as complicated as flamenco.
The way I tune my guitar is very unconventional, and I have never seen it written down before. I guess this fact alone should make it an illegitimate way of tuning your guitar, but it works for an
ignorant fool like myself, who couldn't tell a C from a G if his life depended on it.
So here it is:
1. First of all, tune the thinnest string first (the bottom string, which, of course should be an E), but if you don't know what a E sounds like, tune it to whatever sounds right to you. After all, as long as the strings are tuned relative to each other, the guitar is going to sound
perfect.
2.
Fret the second string (the second thinnest string) on the fifth fret, and
pluck both the first and the second string at the same time. Tune the second string to whatever sounds alright to you.
3. Now here's the unconventional part of it. Pluck both of the strings at the same time, and *feel* the vibrations. What you will most probably notice is that the frequencies of the two sounds will not be the same, which will feel like waves of
vibration (
resonance), going from intense to almost cancelling each other out. Keep tuning, while making sure that the wavelenths are increasing (slowing down), until you feel a constant vibration.
4. Do the same with the third string fretted on the 4th fret and the open second string.
5. Keep going up, fretting the remaining strings on the 5th fret, with the open lower string.
6. Enjoy the noise.
This method is quite hard to learn, I instinctively picked it up after tuning my guitar for about three months straight (I was
a keen camper at the time, so my guitar needed a tuning every week or so). I believe even a deaf person, after getting enough practice, could do a half decent job of tuning a guitar, using this method.
Results may very from person to person