Two years ago I treated myself to a new guitar. This guitar, the RG-4-EX-1, has what’s called a ‘floating bridge’. It allows you to go nuts with the whammy bar, while still keeping the guitar in tune. That’s good. The downside of a floating bridge is that the guitar becomes much, much harder to tune. I tuned it for just the second time this morning, and this time things went much more smoothly than they did the last time. I thought I’d share some tips for tuning such a guitar, because when I did a Google search I didn’t find a decent article explaining how to do it.
A floating bridge is different from a normal bridge because it is not connected solidly to the body of the guitar – it ‘floats’ on a hinge. On the back of the guitar there are springs connected to the bridge; the tension between these springs in the back and the strings of the guitar balance out, holding the bridge roughly in place. Because the bridge floats, increasing the tension on one string pulls the entire bridge closer to the neck of the guitar, decreasing the tension in all of the other strings. This means you can’t tune the guitar one string at a time – if you try that, the first string you tune will fall out of tune by the time you get to the last string.
How do you tune the guitar? First, use an appropriately sized Allen wrench to remove the screws holding the locking plates in place at the top of the neck. My guitar is Japanese, so I had to use a metric set of Allen wrenches. I found that out the hard way. Once you have the locking plates off, loosen the fine-tuning screws almost all the way. Normally the guitar falls down out of tune as the strings stretch out over time, so you want to give yourself plenty of space to increase the tension on the strings. If you’re replacing the strings, you want to replace them one at a time; taking them all out of the guitar at once will release all of the tension on the springs in the back, and make your life that much more difficult.
You’re going to need a decent tuner. I used my new Macbook to tune the guitar, with a handy little program called (oddly enough) Guitar Tuner. The nice thing about the problem is that it shows you how far away your current string is from the note you want it to be – that’s important.
First, get the guitar roughly in tune – i.e. get all of the strings within a few semitones of their proper tuning. When you’re doing this, you want to alternate which string you tune. Don’t just go e-B-G-D-A-E; alternate from the bottom to the top of the neck: E-e-A-B-D-G.
Once you have the guitar roughly in tune, you’re going to follow this iterative process over and over until your guitar is in tune: Strum each of the strings one at a time, and note how out of tune it is. Choose the string that is the most out of tune, and bring it closer to the right tune - not all the way, just a little bit; at most one semitone. Repeat.
The last part is key; don’t tune each string all the way, or you’ll change the tuning on the other strings too much. By tuning each string just a little at a time, you give the other strings time to adjust to the change you’ve made. Hopefully you found this information useful.