Accessories, How To »

I love these little Planet Waves SOS tuners. They call them SOS: Strobe On String and they work by pulsing two little LEDs at a particular frequency. You pluck a string and shine the light on it. If it’s out of tune, the pattern made by the light wobbles about. When the string is in tune, the pattern becomes stable. Easy peasy.
I’ve got a couple of these in my workshop as I frequently need to tune guitars (or even necks mounted on temporary—surrogate—bodies for refrets) with no pickups to plug …

Featured, Software »

The massive-noggined boffins at TC Electronics have just released an incremental version of PolyTune for iPhone.
You’ve probably all read about the PolyTune tuner pedal – the world’s first polyphonic tuner. Strum all strings together and the clever gubbins in the pedal shows the tuning situation of each of your six stings. You can easily tell if one or more strings is out of tune.
Not content with hammering all that cleverness into a stompbox, TC also ported it to the iPhone. And now, that app is at a 1.1 release. It’s …

Featured, Software »

This is cool.
Peterson Tuners are (or at least, should be) ubiquitous in the world of professional guitar techs and luthiers. A Peterson strobe tuner – or, more recently, their Virtual Strobe – is the top of the heap when it comes to tuning accuracy. Most tuners that are available to the man (or lady) on the street are reasonably accurate. The emphasis must be on reasonably though. A strobe-type tuner allows you to ‘see’ finer increments of tuning than most LED or needle tuners can realistically display. This is the …

Headline, Software »

Interesting one this.
Remember a while back, TC Electronics released their – rather clever – PolyTune Pedal that allowed you to see the tuning of all six of your guitar’s strings at once.  Picking one string at a time is so last year.
Well, now TC are porting their cleverness to the iPhone (and iPod Touch if you’ve got a mic thing attached).
It’s early days yet, but the PolyTune App sounds pretty interesting.  In fact, the days are so early that TC are looking for beta testers for the app.
Want to be …

Accessories, Featured »

Mostly because we think it looks pretty cool, let’s take a look at the newly released, Tru-Strobe Pedal Tuner from Planet Waves.
Housed in the die-cast, chunky pedal housing is an accurate tuner with strobe-goodness.  The difference between your signal and the perfectly tuned note is displayed as motion on the big, circular LCD display. When the segments stop moving around, you’re in tune to an accuracy of +/- 0.1 cent.
The unit features full bypass switching and can be calibrated from A400Hz to A499Hz.  The display is high contrast and is …

Accessories, Featured »

OK, so it looks like we may have been fooled, last week, by the very geeky Danish engineer demonstrating the prototype polyphonic tuner.  Still though, we don’t mind too much when we now have the actual, real-deal, polyphonic tuner in easy-peasy, handy, pedal format.
Splendid.
“What’s it all about?” you ask.
Well, simply put, forget about staring at your tuner picking a single string at a time.  Instead, just strum all your strings – open – and the frightfully clever gubbins inside the TC Electonic PolyTune will show you a picture of each …

Featured, News »

They can put a man on the moon but you still need to tune your guitar one string at a time. What’s with that?  What is this, the middle-ages?
Polyphonic tuning, or sounding each string simultaneously so you can easily identify if a particular string – or strings – is out of tune would make life much easier than having to check each, one at a time.
It’s not that easy though.  Isolating each string amongst the harmonic overtones of the others isn’t easy to do.  Until now… Possibly.
This Danish software engineer …

Accessories, Featured »

Rotosound have a new line of accessories planned for 2010.
First up will be two clip-on tuners.  Each allows you to tune your instrument through the built-in microphone or through the vibration transmitted through the instrument’s headstock.
The RTU009 tuner is a chromatic tuner capable of flat tuning and with a range of B0 to B6.
The RTU007 has a built in metronome and its LCD panel is illuminated (handy on a dark stage).  The 007 has a tuning range of A0 through to c8.
Both models provide for A4 calibration of 430 to …

Accessories, Featured »

Agile Partners’ GuitarToolkit (iTunes Link) provides a bundle of guitary goodness all wrapped up in the Appley goodness of your iPhone.

First off there’s a tuner. Using the built-in microphone on your iPhone, you can use the GuitarToolkit’s chromatic tuner to sort yourself out. Alternate tunings aren’t an issue and you can even create your own if whatever weird one you’re using isn’t available.
Potentially more useful for guitarists to carry around in their pockets, however, is the scale and chord library. There’s half a million chords squeezed into this thing.
You can …