All About Guitar Tuners
Image via WikipediaGuitars have been around for seven hundred years or more, and once upon a time it was the devil to tune up. No tuners! One musician who kept tuning higher each time kept breaking his strings. Another who tuned lower each time wondered where the tone went.
And when Andre went over to Felipe's house to jam. Yow! They sounded awful, till they tuned the guitars together.
All of this was remedied by the 'pitch pipe,' which is a kind of whistle. Fits in a pocket, you can play a note, and then tune to that. However, the accuracy of the musician's tuning depended upon the accuracy of the musician's fingers and ears.
THE ELECTRONIC TUNER
With the advent of electronic devices, it became fairly easy to create a fixed frequency inside the device, and to compare the frequency of the guitar. A needle or a row of LED lights show the musician whether he needs to tune the instrument higher or lower. So now we have devices which allow us to precisely detect the pitch we play on our guitars.
DIFFERENT SIZES
Some fit in your pocket. Some are table-top models. Some are 19" rack-mount units. And some go on the floor as stomp boxes.
PRICE RANGE
Depending upon type, model, accuracy, durability, tuners range in price from $10-$85 for LCD/LED/Needle indicator electronic tuners, up to $200-$3000 for mechanical and electronic strobe tuners used for the extreme accuracy needed by piano tuners and luthiers.
More costly tuners offer 'chromatic' tuning, meaning *all* the notes rather than just the notes on the six strings of your guitar. This is required for musicians playing wind instruments, and it can be handy for guitarists who experiment with alternate tunings.
STROBE TUNERS
These are the most accurate; often 20-30 times more accurate than normal LED, LCD, or needle-indicator tuners. Peterson is the best-known manufacturer, but Yamaha and others also manufacture strobe tuners.
A true strobe tuner works like this -- The tuner listens to the frequency of the note from the guitar, and flashes a light (a strobe light) at that frequency. At the same time, a wheel with markings will be spinning at the true frequency. For example, you set the tuner to the note 'E' so the wheel, which has markings through which the light can shine, is spinning at the correct frequency.
Let us say that the guitar note is slightly flat, and therefore the flashing light is flashing a little too slow. Our eyes only see the disk in the bursts of light, and so with each burst, the disk has not quite spun far enough. So it looks like the disk is moving slowly backwards. (Much like the wagon wheels seem to move backwards in old cowboy movies.)
If your guitar note is slightly sharp then the light flashes a little too early each time, and so it appears like the wheel is moving forwards. Our eyes are not fast enough to see the high-frequency pulses of the light, but because the light and the wheel are both moving at close to the same speed, our eyes can see the difference between the two. And this permits us to tune more accurately than with other methods.
Some companies, like Peterson, have now made electronic versions of the 'strobe tuner'. Peterson's methods do approximate the functionality of a true strobe tuner. They are not *quite* as accurate, but they're still far more accurate than normal electronics tuners.
However, beware. Some other manufacturers now make tuners whose display emulates the display on a strobe tuner. However, their accuracy is no more than any other electronic tuner, although this kind of display actually may work a little better for the human looking at it.
[ A side note -- Our company, Voltos Industries, also manufactures an unusual type of electric guitar which is called the 'Mobius Megatar,' and this instrument can be played simply by touching the strings to the frets. It has both bass strings and normal guitar strings on its wide neck, and you can play them with both hands, so you can actually play bass and guitar at the same time, and oddly enough it's pretty easy to learn. But the point is this. We license the famous 'Buzz Feiten Intonation System' which makes the guitar sound more in tune to the human ear, and to set this up, we have to use very precise laboratory strobe tuner made by Peterson, because the adjustments are as small as 1% or 2% of a semi tone. The Peterson allows us to see down to even finer than that, so it works out fine. Moral: true strobe tuners are more accurate, and ... they cost more.]
HOW LED TUNERS WORK
Tuners using LEDs, or LCD panels, or Needles must use an electronic circuit to determine when the guitar note is within a 'window' of acceptable closeness. If the window is made very, very narrow and strict, it's very difficult for the human to operate the device. You're flat, and flat and flat, and now you're sharp. Damn!
Needles, if the circuit which averages the frequency for the slow-moving needle works well, can give you a better reading because you can see yourself coming up on the right place.
The good news is that, although these designs are not truly as accurate as a strobe tuner, the fact is that they're certainly more accurate than most people's hearing, and with practice you can sound perfectly in tune using these less-expensive (and more portable) tuners!
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT PITCH
However, with any tuner, practice makes you better and better and better, and of course the practice of tuning up also improves your ears. So after a while, a musician may be looking at the tuner, but his ears are telling him as much as the tuner does!
TUNER FUNCTION AND PRICING
The job of the tuner is made more complicated because the guitar note is a much more complex waveform than the sound of, for example, a flute. The tuner circuit must therefore *average* the frequency over a number of cycles. This can slow the response of the tuner, and again it takes it away from strict accuracy.
Because of the complexity of the job, the simplest and least expensive tuners may give you only one reference pitch, like the note 'A' from our friend the pitch-pipe of years ago. Or the simple tuner will give you the six notes of the open guitar strings.
Tuners which can handle all thirteen chromatic notes, and which can handle them at different octaves, are called 'chromatic' tuners, and they cost more money, because it's a more tricky engineering feat to design these circuits.
STOMP BOXES / RACK UNITS
Performing musicians often find it more convenient to have their tuner in the same form as other electronic gear used in performance, and therefore some tuners are built into stomp boxes for convenience, or built into a standard 19" rack-mount space. It's a lot of space to use for just a tuner, and so makers of common electronic effects may often simply include a tuner as part of what the effects module does.
DETUNING GUITARS
In the Baroque period, musicians playing instruments of the times sometimes detuned below the official frequency of the note 'A'. Why? Because in some cases they thought the instruments sounded better. Who are we to argue?
Even today, some guitar bands will detune the guitars slightly lower, to Eb or D, for a lower and more resonant sound. Try it some time on your guitar. It changes the stiffness of the strings, gives a different playing feel, and a different sound comes out of the amp.
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FURTHER INFORMATION:
Wikipedia: Electronic Tuner
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