Frequently asked questions

Sign in, open the user menu up top and hit My Guitars. There's an Add a Guitar form at the bottom of that page: give it a name, pick your string count and scale length, and save. The tension settings can wait, they default to something reasonable.

A name, the string count, and a scale length. Everything else already has a sensible default, so you can ignore the tension stuff until you care about it.

Yeah, saved guitars live on your account. Don't want to sign up? You can still set a scale length and tension straight on any tuning page and your browser will hang onto them for next time.

As many as you want. They all sit on your My Guitars page, but only one is active at a time, and that's the one the calculator actually reads.

It's the distance from the nut to the bridge, in inches. Longer scale means more tension for the same note, which is exactly why it moves the gauges we suggest. A 25.5" and a 27" guitar tuned to the same pitch won't want the same strings.

One where every string gets its own scale length, longer under the low strings and shorter under the high ones. You get a tighter, cleaner low end without the treble strings feeling like cheese wire.

Only flip on Enable Multi Scale if your guitar genuinely has a fanned-fret neck. Straight frets? Leave it off. Once it's on, the single scale dropdown splits into one box per string so you can type a length for each.

It's the total pull, in pounds, across the whole set. We start you at 114 lbs for a 6-string, 130 for a 7, 148 for an 8 and 160 for a 9, then ease that down by about 2 lbs for every semitone you're tuned below standard. Treat those as starting points, not gospel, and nudge from there until it feels right under your hands.

They change how your target total gets shared out across the strings. Standard is the safe pick and feels close to a factory set. Balanced evens things out so no string is pulling much harder than its neighbour. And Heavy Bottom pushes extra tension onto the wound low strings, which is the one you want for drop tunings and chugging.

The preset decides how much of the total each string carries, and the gauges follow. Switch to Heavy Bottom and watch the low strings get noticeably thicker.

A tension type takes one number and splits it up for you. Multi Tension throws that out and lets you set the exact target for every single string yourself. Full manual mode.

When no preset nails the feel. Maybe you're copying a specific player, say Lee Malia and his .080 bottom string that no normal set gives you, or building an oddball drop tuning where you want some strings tighter than others. Bands like Fit For An Autopsy mix packs and singles to hit their exact numbers; this is the setting for that.

Switch on Enable Multi Tension and you'll get a target-tension box for every string, each tagged with its position and note so you know which is which.

It makes that guitar your current one. From then on the calculator uses its scale length and tension settings for every recommendation instead of the generic defaults.

Your scale length and target tensions drive the recommended gauge for each string, and which packs score best against a tuning. Same tuning on a different guitar can give you a different answer.

Hit Clear guitar on the tuning page. That deactivates it and hands you back the standard scale and tension controls.

Yep. Once a guitar is active it sticks with you through every tuning you browse, right up until you clear it.