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The trouble with tuners


bengerm77

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So I have a cheapie pewaves pt10 true bypass tuner. It's pretty neat and gets the job done...

 

 

....ALMOST.

 

It's like I can tune with the tuner and then tune a little closer by ear. Maybe I'm just hearing things.

 

This leaves me to wonder, is the strobe mode on the pitchblack tuner better? How accurate is it? I know I'm just not going to be using any kind of left to right tuning needle anymore if (as I suspect) strobe tuning is the thing of the future.

 

Am I being too picky?

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that's because when you tune by ear you usually fret the strings to do so.....when you tune with a tuner you only usually tune to the open strings, that's why you can tune better by ear because no guitar is perfectly intonated at every fret.

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Depends on how accurate the tuner is. Could be more due to intonation like melx said, but a crappy tuner could just not be accurate enough. Check it's specs to see the +/- accuracy of your tuner.

 

I've had more problems with tuners that don't track well enough or fast enough.

 

But I got a pitchblack and haven't had the experience of being annoyed at my tuner since!

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Yeah, I'd rather use my ears too, but nobody likes watching somebody tune a guitar really really loudly in front of them. Also if I start dicking around onstage then the rest of my bandmates will too. The only way to prevent audio anarchy is by tuning sliently.

sound like I just need to upgrade.

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So I have a cheapie pewaves pt10 true bypass tuner. It's pretty neat and gets the job done...



....ALMOST.


It's like I can tune with the tuner and then tune a little closer by ear. Maybe I'm just hearing things.


This leaves me to wonder, is the strobe mode on the pitchblack tuner better? How accurate is it? I know I'm just not going to be using any kind of left to right tuning needle anymore if (as I suspect) strobe tuning is the thing of the future.


Am I being too picky?

 

 

I know exactly what you are talking about. My TU-2 works very well but there is a range of a few cents up or down where I still get the green light. I can hear it... I'll tell you this, though - it's much easier, quicker and more accurate to get 99% there with the tuner then tweak slightly by ear, than tuning by ear from scratch. I think unless you have perfect pitch, it's easy to get off by a bit as your ear adjusts to the pitches you are hearing.

 

From what I understand, strobes are much more accurate.

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that's because when you tune by ear you usually fret the strings to do so.....when you tune with a tuner you only usually tune to the open strings, that's why you can tune better by ear because no guitar is perfectly intonated at every fret.

 

 

Yep, for sure. Even with intonation perfect (aside from that goddamned G string on an Epiphone which on almost every model is nearly impossible to get correct), it's still out a bit.

 

It used to drive me nuts at how out some of the strings would be at certain points up the neck....especially when doing open chords and weird chords up the neck....but i've developed a couple of test points where I arrive at a good compromise of the strings being slightly out of tune with each other, because it's either that or there will be one section where they're exactly in tune, and then there will be the point up the neck or the strings/ chords where they're out of tune too much.

 

Tuners--even with correct ballistics (response time to the string pitch)--will always be out a little bit further up the neck.

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