Tuner question (guitar not radio...boom boom)!

[jreading]

First off before I get a barrage of people telling me to do it by ear.....Yes yes blah blah!

I was wondering on peoples recommendations of chromatic tuners for resonators to help with speedy altered tunings.
Clip on types any good or not?
Just wondered what other people use. I still have my first Seiko automatic tuner which I got with my first guitar back in 1992 I believe, which has probably been more of a hindrance to my ear than a help. Laziness I guess as I can, when required use, my ears for standard tuning but choose not to!

I await both help and a telling off no doubt.

[Michael Messer]

Hi jreading,

Nobody will tell you off because everyone uses them these days.

Clip on tuners are great - the one to get is the Snark 'All Instrument Tuner' ....the red one.

Also, a really excellent and very accurate tuner (if you have an iPhone or any smart phone) is the Cleartune Chromatic Tuner - app tuner from iTunes made by Bitcount Ltd.

I hope that is helpful....

Shine On
Michael

[wrinkleygit]

for an iphone app, check out "guitar toolkit", the tuner on this is amazing as well as all the other stuff in the app, haven't used anything else since I found this a couple of years ago, mike b.

[Deleted]

You know, until about a couple of years ago, I was all 'yeah I do pitch perfect by ear', and then I just seem to have got much worse at it (I'm nearly 50, excuses etc). So now I'm all reliant on tuners. Snark defo, although most clip-ons work well until a plastic bit breaks off.
TT

[uatru]

I use the Martin app on IOS which is free and seems pretty good

[obrienp]

Plus one for Snark. I have tried quite a few different clip-on tuners and have come round to the Snark being the best. The Snark seems to be less bothered by noisy environments (e.g. gigs, workshops, etc) than others I have tried. I don't know whether the other clip-ons I have tried are just too sensitive but they seem to pick up the pitch of other nearby instruments, as well as your own and get confused.

Slide on,
Pat

[mikenewport]

Red snark for me as well, on the android phone I use the free 'Da Tuner Lite'. My ears are not that brilliant these days so tuning with a tuner pretty much the way to go. By the way the snark can use vibration or mic, the latter I haven't tried. Sometimes I find that the snark misses the 6th string in lower tunings, so I use the octave to tune that one.

All the best

Mike

[mitchfit]

+1 for snark. works fine, and cheap enough that
even buying one for back-up is not financially
burdensome.

usually use tremolo in tube amps, VERY hard to
tune a guitar without turning amp to zero, or
the guitar volume knob.

the only glitch encountered with mine is open
D tuning on my Guild D40C, it almost always
calls F# a G on that guitar. tuned the same as
all my others which register F#! ??

when i used to use phase shifters--forget it.
impossible to tune with amp going. [i blame
Al Stewart's "Nostradamus" in "Past, Present
And Future]

mitchfit

[jreading]

Thanks for the recommendations. I forwarded a link to the red Snark to my wife hinting that if she loves me she should buy me one for Xmas! I'll probably get a lump of coal...

[jreading]

Got the Snark.

Brilliant bit of kit, thanks for the advice folks.

[Quarterquay]

Nov 30, 2013 1:10:46 GMT @deuce said:

You know, until about a couple of years ago, I was all 'yeah I do pitch perfect by ear', and then I just seem to have got much worse at it (I'm nearly 50, excuses etc). So now I'm all reliant on tuners. Snark defo, although most clip-ons work well until a plastic bit breaks off.
TT

Have you tried taking a hearing test Deuce or had a doctor look in your ears? I only ask because for quite a while until recently I was seriously starting to worry about my hearing, particularly in one ear as deafness runs in one branch of my family and my hearing was getting slowly but progressively worse. As it happens it turns out it was far more simple than that and now entirely cured . (I won't go into details but it was worth the trip and I was amazed at the difference it made.I'd forgotten what stereo was!)
You can take an online hearing test here.

www.hearinglosscheck.org/hearingcheck/check/

Basically you listen to a series of numbers being read out to you through headphones. You then type what you hear or think you hear into your keypad.
The numbers are increasingly obscured by background noise. Once you've done the test you'll click through to a simple test result. One page along the way will ask for your email address. You don't have to fill this in,just click through to the next page to get your results.

It's very basic and of course for a full and proper test a visit to a doctor is the only way to go for anyone but the online test will give you a basic idea.