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Why Is “Standard” Guitar Tuning, Well, Standard?
E-A-D-G-B-e.
While this may be a random assortment of letters to most people, if you play guitar you recognize them at once: standard tuning.
Almost every guitar you have ever picked up and played has been tuned this way. It’s the tuning we all learned on and the one we all just accept as “normal.”
But why is this arrangement of notes considered the standard? What makes it better than any other alternative? How did we even come to that decision?
The answer can be summed up in one word: playability.
Finding the perfect interval
Standard tuning for the guitar is based on a series of perfect fourth intervals, with one major third interval mixed in for good measure. This means that the distance in pitch between most adjacent strings is four steps of the major scale (fourth), with one pair that is only three steps apart (third).
The guitar, of course, is not the only stringed instrument (as much as guitarists want you to think it is). And other instruments in the family have different intervals between strings. The violin and cello, for instance, are both tuned in fifths. So why not guitars?
It turns out, size matters. The scale length of a violin, for example, is only…
