Site Review: HowToTuneAGuitar.org

If you've ever looked for instructional guitar videos online, you'll find an ugly pile of subscription sites and "pay us and you'll play like Clapton in thirty days" claims that you know are extremely bloated. I've looked at a few sites that have appeared to be good, but I'm not going to spend the money to get into the subscription areas. It seems like it is a misguided use of my money. Recently I have come across a site that is playing by a (slightly) different set of rules: http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org.

Why On-line Tuning?
The name of the site makes it seem like a one-trick pony, but it actually has more goodness buried inside. First, let's talk about the main focus: Tuning a guitar. Yes, I know most guitarists have a digital tuner of their own, but when you're working at your desktop studio, sometimes it is easier to use online tools than to 1) find your tuner, 2) find fresh battery for the tuner, 3) unplug your rig to connect the tuner, 4) tune it, before 5) putting everything back the way it was, and you've forgotten what you were going to play.

Tune Me
The online tuner is a six note widget that allows you to turn on each note, and it will repeat a clean guitar tone of that note until you turn that one off. Then you can tune by ear to the tone it plays. (If you're really interested in wasting time, you can play a rudimentary tune on it, as long as you are only playing the open strings - but that's goofing off, isn't it?) What makes this so helpful beyond a pocket tuner is all of the alternate tunings. There are a ton of alternates both familiar (Drop D, Half Step Down, etc) and a lot that are completely alien to me (I have no idea WHAT a Buzzard tuning is, but I now know it tunes to C, F, C, G, A#, F). One weakness to the tuner is that when it is playing tuning notes for alternate forms of instrument, it uses the same tones. For example, the Dobro setting still sounds like a regular guitar. But this can be overlooked for two main reasons: It is a free tool, and I don't actually own any of the unusual instruments like a Dobro.

Another bonus is the tuner widget. It is a mini-version of the tuner on the site, but limited to standard tuning only. I have embedded it in my sidebar (Called "Tune-O-Matic"), if you want to play with it.

Tutorials
In addition to the tuner, the site also features a decent library of guitar lessons. These do not appear to be custom videos for the site, but rather the results of extensive YouTube digging. As a result, they are at various levels of helpfulness, and the "teachers" are at various skill levels themselves. But they are pretty good. (I particularly like the way the teaching video for "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World" includes on-screen diagrams and read-along fingering and pattern charts overlaid over the video). Even though these are all YouTube embedded videos, the site provides a good filter for pre-screened content, so you don't have to waste time getting lost in the vacuum of YouTube, where people have been known to get lost for days.

Chords and Scales
They also another widget called "Chordbot", which gives you 4 fingerings for just about every possible chord you've ever heard of, in a nice visual of the fretboard in a very readable format. If learning the various scales is more your interest, there are also multiple fingerings presented for every major and minor scale, again in a nicely presented format (though as individual pages for each scale, unlike the integrated "Chordbot").

Reviews
There are a few "reviews" on the site as well, primarily of teaching tools and lesson software. I'm not too interested in buying lessons, as I mentioned earlier, but I took a closer look anyway. It didn't take long to realize that the "reviews" section is really just an affiliate link farm, with all the ones I checked linking to pages that were built in exactly the same endless one-page-infomercial format common with "get rick quick" e-book sites. So there isn't anything that I would consider a "review", and I'd recommend pretending that section doesn't exist.

Other Stuff
Yes, there is actually a section called "Other Stuff", which is a infrequent blog of guitar related topics. There seems to be some level of ranting against Guitar Hero, but that's to be expected from "normal" guitarists. Not a lot of action on the blog, so probably not something to be on the top of your feed reader (if at all).

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
HowToTuneAGuitar.org is good at their core proposition: tuning your guitar. They are also good with their collection of YouTube-scavenged Guitar lessons. And yes, the Chordbot and the scales are worth your while, too. The rest? Blatant ads that take up more space than their original content. Go for the tuner, stay for the Chordbot and the lessons. Skip the rest.