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Strings and Tuners: Six Wires Under Tension

What actually sets a string's pitch, why three are wound and three are bare, and the gearing that holds it all still.

Three things, and only three, set the pitch of a string: how long it is, how tight it is, and how heavy it is per unit of length. Longer, looser or heavier means lower. Shorter, tighter or lighter means higher.

This explains the shape of a string set. Your six strings are all the same length and all at roughly similar tension — they have to be, or the neck would twist. So the only variable left to make the low strings low is mass. That is why the bass strings are thick and the treble strings are thin.

But you cannot simply make a string thicker, because a thick solid wire is stiff, and a stiff string will not flex properly or fret in tune. The solution is a wound string: a thin, flexible steel core with a second wire wrapped tightly around it in a spiral. You get the mass without the stiffness.

Six loose steel guitar strings laid out side by side and labelled E, A, D, G, B, E, the four thicker ones visibly spiral-wound and the two thin ones plain, each with a brass ball end
A full set, low to high. The bottom four are wound — you can see the spiral winding — and the top two are plain steel. The brass rings are the ball ends that anchor in the bridge. Photo: Auge=mit, CC BY-SA 3.0

Materials have changed more than you would guess. For most of the guitar's history strings were gut, from sheep intestine, with the lower ones wound in metal from the 1600s onward. Steel strings became common on American guitars in the early twentieth century, and they are the reason X-bracing and truss rods had to be invented — gut never pulled that hard. Nylon arrived for classical guitars in the late 1940s, after the war made gut scarce, and it replaced gut almost completely within a decade.

One warning worth repeating: steel and nylon strings are not interchangeable. A classical guitar is not braced for steel-string tension and fitting steel strings to one can pull the bridge off.

At the other end of the string are the tuners, also called machine heads or tuning pegs. The problem they solve is mechanical. A string under 7 or 8 kilograms of tension will happily unwind a peg you turn by hand, and the pitch adjustments you need are far too fine for fingers alone.

Close-up of a single gold-plated guitar tuning machine, showing its button, housing and the post the string winds around
One tuning machine. The button turns a worm gear inside the housing, which drives a cog on the post. The gearing multiplies your turn — typically fourteen to eighteen turns of the button per turn of the post — which is what makes fine tuning possible, and the worm gear cannot be driven backwards, so string tension cannot unwind it. Photo: Hsw1976, public domain
An acoustic guitar headstock seen from the front with six tuning machines in a three-a-side arrangement and a white nut where the strings leave the fingerboard
The headstock end: three tuners a side, and at the bottom of the picture the white nut, slotted to space the strings and set their height at the top of the neck. The nut is the string's other hard stop, the partner to the saddle. Photo: Elmschrat, CC BY-SA 4.0

Tuner

Put it to use. Tune up before your next practice session, one string at a time.

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Not listening
FlatSharp
How to use the tunerHit Start Tuning and allow microphone access, then pluck a single string and let it ring. The needle centers and turns green when you’re in tune (within 5 cents); it leans left for flat, right for sharp. In standard tuning, low to high, the open strings are E, A, D, G, B, and E again — the label under the note name tells you which one you’re closest to.

Try the six open strings, low to high, and say the names as you go. Low E, A, D, G, B, high E. Learning them now saves you from counting later.

The six open strings, low to high

Nothing fretted — this is the sound of the instrument's six fixed reference points.

e
B
G
D
A
E
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