For example, it might perform perfectly in a darkened club, but take it to an outdoor gig and the sun might completely wash out the screen. It’s also important to make sure you select a guitar tuner with a bright enough display to be read in all types of environment. Or if you opt for a clip-on tuner, from your headstock. If you have poor eyesight, you need to make sure that you select a model with a large enough display for it to be read from your pedalboard. What’s the use of your tuner if you can’t properly read the values due to the screen being too small, or too dimly lit? Or during sections where you don’t play, you can easily mute yourself to instantly kill feedback or amp hum.
For example, you can spare your audience the horrendous sound of cables being plugged in during a guitar swap. In addition, you can use this muting feature in other scenarios. Tuning in silence will help you project a more professional appearance when playing live. Muting Your Guitarīeing able to hear your strings when tuning is acceptable when you’re in your bedroom, but what about when you’re playing live? Do you really want the audience to be able to hear you tuning up in between songs?Ī great feature of a quality guitar tuner is the ability to mute your signal when you’re using it. So try to aim for something with an accuracy of at least +/- 2 cents to be safe. However other sources show that people with good ear training (such as us musicians!) can detect variances in pitch as low as 2, or even 1 cent! In my research for this article, I found a study that suggested that humans can only distinguish a difference in pitch of 5-6 cents or more. So once tuned using that pedal, the actual note could be 1 cent higher or 1 cent lower than the reading. So this means that an A# note is 100 cents higher (or one semitone) than an A note.Īt the store I work at, our best-selling guitar tuner pedal is the Boss TU-3, which is accurate to within plus or minus 1 cent. A cent is one-hundredth of a semitone (so 1%), and a semitone equates to a single fret on your fingerboard.
The degree of accuracy of a guitar tuner is measured in ‘cents’. The more accurate your guitar tuner is, the closer you will be to perfect pitch. Wait a minute, all a tuner needs to do is tell you the pitch of each string, right? Well yeah, but there are a few key features that set apart a basic model from a great model. They are a little more complicated to read, but once you get used to them the extra accuracy is well worth the additional outlay. Strobe Tuners – Strobe tuners tend to be the most costly options, but they are also the most accurate. Great for very quick adjustments on the fly, or for quickly checking you are still in tune mid-song. Polyphonic Tuners – Polyphonic tuners are a more recent innovation and allow you to tune all of your strings at the same time. Tuning is done one note at a time, and these units tend to be the most affordable option. Chromatic tuners will only identify each of the 12 notes found in the chromatic scale in Western music (i.e. They are not full chromatic tuners.Ĭhromatic Tuners – These are the most common types of guitar tuner. Guitar Tuners – These types of tuners are specialized only for the notes and tunings related specifically to guitars (e.g. This article is pretty long, so why not skip to the part(s) you’re interested in? Finally, I will answer some common tuner questions that you might have. We’ll first look at the different types of tuner available, then we’ll discuss what key features you should be looking for, and then we’ll look at my current favorite guitar tuners broken down by style and budget. In this article, I’ll try my best to clear up the confusion and make your choice a simple one! Keeping your guitar as close to perfect pitch as possible is fundamental in helping you to sound your best, so a quality tuner is a key part of every guitarist’s toolkit. Thanks for ‘tuning’ in! With so many different options available, it can be a difficult task trying to find the best guitar tuner for your personal situation.
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