I’m afraid that not all tuners are the same, and the point is not all A’s on the guitar are the same either.
If you use a cheap tuner to get a reference pitch like A and then tune the rest of your guitar strings by ear to that reference pitch, then yeah, the tuner’s alright, but if the tuner doesn’t take tempered tuning into consideration, (And a lot of cheap tuners don’t) and you use it to tune all your open strings (As you would when performing live) then your tuning is going to be off because its going to give you a standard reference pitch for every string and the guitar will no longer be in tune with itself.
I compromise. But I don’t have to be happy that I do. I generally, due to the instruments and style of music I play, temper my tuning so in D, C, and B it is as close to natural tuning as possible. But I also play with dudes that have A435 and A444 instruments. So usually I just say Fuck It
I was a Theory nerd in college, so please forgive me if I get overly pedantic or bloviate.
This always makes me giggle. “I just tuned my instrument, why isn’t it in tune!?”
Tuning is a balance board, not an absolute. Anyone that wants to really understand tuning, make a ukelele. Or a whistle. Or a drum. If you really listen, your mind will be blown.
Please, this is BoingBoing. If I didn’t love pedantic bloviation, I wouldn’t be reading the comments here .
I play guitar, and I hear a lot of amateur guitarists like myself play. Between finicky intonation and a sometimes iron grip, I wish my biggest pitch error came from shitty tuners.
I mostly make electronic music. I also play odd percussion, and the occasional bit of fretless bass or lap steel (with far less than perfect intonation).
It’s amazing what can be covered up with modulation
i’m the shittiest of guitar players. and i’m fine with that. and really, why am i arguing other than to show i paid good money to go to music school? (that i don’t use)
play music, enjoy it, and hopefully others will enjoy it. that’s really all there is. and if you can get people to stand up and dance, bonus points.
(btw, i think we have a music thread(s) of some sort around here, please feel free to contribute. we can get weird, but there’s nothing a music nerd likes more than another music nerd)
The big differences are convenience, especially when you’re trying to tune in a room with other people, vs. the amount of detail in the display. The clip-on tuners are picking up vibrations directly, so it shows what note your instrument is making, and doesn’t matter what notes everybody else in the room are playing. Your smartphone tuner app is using the audio pickups, so it’s going to pick up any sounds around. Also, you’ve got to balance the smartphone on your instrument while tuning it, while you just clip the clip-on onto your instrument and you’re ready to go, so you can leave it there while you’re playing, retune in the middle of a session if things don’t sound right, and at $5 you can buy one for each instrument and just leave it attached or in the instrument case.
For some instruments, there isn’t a good place to clip them, so the phone works better. My ukes are the right shape for a clip-on, but most of my mountain dulcimers have a different shaped head, and either they’re too thick to get the clip to stay on (or the clip explodes :- ) or they don’t pick up vibrations well enough.
(And as somebody else said, the “440 G” isn’t telling you that it’s hearing 440Hz and that’s a G - it’s telling you that the tuner is set to an A=440Hz scale and it’s hearing a frequency that’s close to G and you should look at the meter to see how sharp or flat it is. If you’re playing baroque music with other people you might all be tuned to an A=435 scale instead, or if you’re playing along with a harder-to-retune instrument, like a piano or pipe organ or some horns, you might want to set your scale to match theirs, because you’ve got 4-6 strings and they’ve got 88 or 0.)
That’s why I play instruments with frets, so I only have to figure out within a half-inch or so where to put my finger (or equivalently, instruments with keys or holes.) (The reason I played baritone horn in high school instead of trombone was simpler - they needed 4 people marching with baritone horns, and actually playing was optional. So my family only had to hear me making honking noises while I learned it, instead of out-of-tune honking noises on a trombone.)
Frets and fretless are both fun :D. Pick up a cheap ass lap steal, a heavy slide, and an old sears tube amp. In about ten minutes you’ll be convinced you’re the next country music legend
Maybe play the fretless bass instead - longer strings, more leeway, eh? Chords like those about 3 minutes into this video become easy-peasy, right? (And I’m not even putting up a piece where Caron is showing off - it’s the guitarist, Cusson, who’s showing off here.)
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(that i don’t use)
