A rough guide to Compact Stage Tuners

When I escaped into bands, tuning was conducted intermittently by whoever had a tuning fork, or had just tuned to the record he’d been learning lyrics from, or by a bossy keyboardist who was incapable of getting in tune with the rest of us. Now we’ve handed it over to electronic technology, there are no more excuses, no more tuning creeping gradually sharper until the singer cracks a high note and complains. Today, UK music dealers Stentor sell less than 10 a year of the C 261.6Hz to C 523.3Hz Walker tuning fork chromatic sets.

If we are not careful, there can be a loss to us as musicians — just as there was when we handed over the PA knobs to the friend who couldn’t play but had a van — of aural engagement with the nuts and bolts of what we do. On our village choir carol-singing expeditions of yore, our conductor would pick a likely profitable location, fish out a keychain mouth organ, blow its C and hum our keynote interval from it, laying off for the aging contralto’s dodgy high note. It wasn’t a very good choir, but every bucolic amateur within it could hit their starting harmony interval from the keynote, on the downbeat, without hesitation.

There’s no doubting the efficiency of tuners, and a Korg GT-120 costs £88, while the Walker fork set costs £141. But still, you can’t fish out your airline teabag with a GT-120 when your plastic spoon has broken, nor use it to fasten a public loo door shut when the bolt is missing, so an A=440 tuning fork can still claim a place in your pocket. I’m told sales of the individual A forks are consistent and still reasonably healthy.

I found the Intellitouch extremely useful backstage, and sometimes on stage as well when there was a temperature and/or humidity change. It was designed to project out from the back of the headstock, which was a problem if you also had rearward-projecting machine head pegs, and I got used to having it on the wrong way round and reading it upside down. There is an issue with neck resonances and the Intellitouch can fail to settle down if it’s located where it can detect one, so it’s not something I’d trust anywhere near setting intonation, but it was good enough for the hurly-burly. As with many tuners, a 12th-fret harmonic (as enthusiasts Peterson remind us, the ‘flageolet’ note) does help it to register.

My other Intellitouch grumbles have been to do with construction, and, to be fair, pop-out plastic battery covers are generically prone to losing their catches, so they require a less-than-casual attitude on the road. I did have a clip arm on a new Intellitouch disintegrate voluntarily and without any obvious external violence, and the company were good with warranty support.

I could gripe about the tiny and very low-contrast note and octave display, and the small-print cent scale, but that’s only really a problem if you can’t hear your guitar at all. The workaround is to get into the limitations of a standard or open tuning preset, so that the needle and up/down lights indicate off the scale until you get close to pitch of one of the prescribed notes. The GT-120 gives you open D, E, G, A and DADGAD, which is reasonably eclectic; looking at my own repertoire, open-C and drop-C tunings don’t figure more than a couple of times.

I’m inclined to accept the visual trade-off for the more convenient (certainly than the AT-12) overall size, but if you’re into the higher-number dioptre spectacle lenses, you might like to take a little extra care over this if you’re considering mail order. The AT-12 and the older MT-1200 (also discontinued) were easier to see, and this can be an issue in a badly lit or awkwardly laid out dressing room as well as on a workbench.

The big deal about the Korgs was always the slow, steady needle, which is stable enough to show reliably the change on a vibrating string as you tune it, and indeed to show the sharpening effect and settle down from plucking hard. Korg offer a clip-on pickup (catalogue reference CM-100L) that plugs into the GT-120, and is light and easy to use. The GT-120 will accept power from a Boss PSA, so it can be left on all day on a bench. All of the gadgets like that from my tech days were switched on and off in one go at the mains. None of them is heavy, and I still gaffer-tape my tuners down to stop them flicking around on the end of a writhing guitar lead.

This arrangement makes the device suspect for the long term because of the pop-in/pop-out plastic hinge arrangement, and if you’re packing it up every night, you need to remove the cover to move it around to the front so the unit doesn’t switch on in the gig bag. It does switch off after a while to conserve the battery, but gig bag knocks tend to be repetitive. It does not grip my music stand shelf tightly, but relies on its own weight to hang securely.

The ‘big-print’ Korg is the chromatic DT-4 (£50), with a mic and a quarter-inch jack input. It looks like a small travel alarm clock and has a 50mm-diameter display with nice bright LEDs. It’s a shame it doesn’t have a DC input (it runs on two AAA batteries), otherwise it would be an ideal one to Velcro into your pedalboard and forget about until it’s needed. It’s the tuner that shows up best in most conditions. It displays centrally the note it thinks you’re aiming at, and has a choice of three options for showing if you’re close or not. The most fun is a scheme where three LEDs light and rotate — clockwise for sharp, or anti-clockwise for flat. The most practical is one where LEDs light dimly to indicate a clock-type face, and your degree of ‘tuned-ness’ is shown before (for flat) or after (for sharp) 12 o’clock by a brighter LED. The third option shows two LEDs, each on the opposite side, which meet at the top when you’re in tune.

Planet Waves produce a similarly operating high-visibility LED tuner, the PW-CT-04, which would suit a pedalboard better. It accepts 9V DC with a centre-negative pin in line with the Boss PSA 200mA supply and wants 0.3 Amps — 100mA more than the Boss PSA can supply, so you’re looking at a Visual Sound 1 Spot, a Dunlop Brick or similar.

The PW-CT-04 is sensitive and stable and, accuracy-checked against a couple of others, seems perfectly fine for stage use. It is comparatively heavy, clocking 24oz including battery on my kitchen scales.

A pal showed me a headstock clip-on Intelli tuner, but perhaps words have been had, because it seems now to have had a name change to Tune Tech TT-500. It’s OK, accurate and reasonably visible.

Seiko’s headstock clip-on tuner, the STX1, is interesting-looking, but fails at the first hurdle. To remove the battery cover and activate or replace the battery, you first have to find a jeweller’s cross-head screwdriver and remove a tiny screw. I am still unable to understand why it gave all my tuning forks a green light alongside the A=441 marking. Somewhere in the 950 x 400mm information sheet printed tightly in eight languages there may be an answer, but meanwhile I am going to guess conflicting and unintuitive layout of the tuning LEDs and the calibration marks.

Seiko have also produced a novelty keyring-type tuner, the ST01 (£11), which is of dubious practical worth, but might be amusing.

The Boss TU-12EX is a newer version of the TU-12 and costs £85. It’s more compact and offers flat tuning (up to six semitones lower), plus an Accu-Pitch function, which sounds a beep when the correct tuning is reached.

Also a new addition to the Boss tuner line-up is the TU-1000 stage tuner, which offers a large, high-intensity LED meter for visibility in the dark and outdoors. It powers up to six effects processors and has two audio outputs, including one with direct signal flow.

It is interesting to see how (mostly!) prices and sizes have come down over the years. Compare Korg’s original standard tuning guitar tuner with the current similarly functioning GA-30 (£13), for instance. The latter, like the TM-40 (£33), does not have a lock off switch. And although it is harder than the TM-40 to turn on accidentally, if it’s going in a gig bag it’s sensible to take the batteries out. The TM-40 is a combination tuner and metronome that I thought would be useful on the road. After it flattened two sets of two AAA batteries beating time to itself — first in a plane hold, where luckily security didn’t notice the bleeping, and then in a car boot — I learned to take them out. And when I lost the loose ones, I learned to leave it at home. Although the LCD screen and LCD needle are not easy to see in poor or very bright light, it gives a quite stable indication. Neither the TM-40 nor the GA-30 accepts external power.

Peterson have transcribed the mechanical strobe tuner function into a digital program, and this is what is available more cheaply than the mechanical in the StroboStomp, the StroboFlip and the V-SAM. They are wonderfully accurate, but a little tiring to use for long periods. Peterson are tuning enthusiasts and will explain to you all kinds of historical temperaments and ‘sweetened’ tunings that you can apply to guitar, and you can preset these in their tuners. We generally refer to tuning in terms of equal temperament, and variations are possible on this that allow for, say, the depression of a string, the accuracy of a thirds-based open tuning, the tuning of woodwinds or strings, and for setting up period instruments in the temperament in which very old music was written. Read their fascinating info at www.petersontuners.com.

A more discreet solution for the stage front in punter view is the StroboStomp, through which, like the StroboFlip, one can run signal on the way to processors. It has a balanced out for DI, but this will reject phantom power. It has true bypass, muting the signal when you depress the button and dropping offline when you’re ready to play. Battery access is by a side door with a retaining clip for the nine-volt. It will run on a standard centre-negative 9V power supply, and Peterson list the power consumption at 80mA. All the sockets are on the front, including a thoughtful 9V pass ‘through’, so it’s tidy to slot into a pedalboard.

The visibility of the screen on both StroboStomp and StroboFlip is very good, but as with all tuners on stage, if the lighting is really bright you might want to make a small hood — cardboard and gaffer-tape will do it — or kick it into the shade of a monitor. The StroboStomp will also pack away with your pedals more easily than the StroboFlip.

I also wonder how precise we’re actually going to be about tuning when the audience is sitting there waiting for us to do something else? The Peterson boast is absolutely justifiably about pin-sharp accuracy — they claim to 0.1 of a cent (they also helpfully explain cents, along with everything else you could ever possibly wonder about tuning), and this is what makes them priceless for setting intonation.

Both the StroboStomp and StroboFlip are very easy and intuitive to use — upwards movement for sharp, downwards for flat — and anyone used to needles or LEDs could settle down comfortably with the principle without a problem. They both have a range of temperaments and a facility whereby you can program in your own compensations.

I don’t see it replacing a stand-alone tuner, which I’d be prepared to put at more risk — of damage or thievery — but here is a thoroughly comprehensive range of functions and temperaments that’s as much fun as it is practical.

I loaded it into a 12-inch PowerBook G4 running OSX10.4.10, and have hit no snags or conflicts in the older version 1.30 or the October 2008 release 2.0, now on OSX10.4.11. It will accept input from the Mac’s mini-jack in, or it will use the Mac’s microphone, and there is a noise-rejection process in the setup that will take account of computer noise.

StroboSoft 2.0 has beefed up input sensitivity to the extent that the thinnest first string on the lightest vintage single coil will now show a stable reading without requiring any preamping. It could be somewhat wobbly in 1.30, although I used the older version during a winter 2008 USA tour to track humidity variations’ effect on tunings with no problems. It’s as accurate and stable as the hardware tuners, and will show pitch deviation in either cents off or Hertz.

The Deluxe version has all the temperaments anybody already thought of, and if they’re not enough you can progam your own, as well as program to flatten or (something about which I have serious reservations) capo retaining open notes names. Access to all the functions is via the tuner face, and it also gives you an uncalibrated oscilloscope window that shows your waveform, and a frequency analysis window, which is extremely useful for showing you a note’s harmonic content, and which in 2.0 Deluxe has a helpful red cross over the fundamental. If you want to go into it cautiously, you can upgrade the Standard version to Deluxe later.

I found myself using the GT-120 with a feed into the computer and StroboSoft when I had a look at my intonation. I still find the movement of the needle very helpful with the sharpening displacement of the attack transient, but the precision and detail of StroboSoft’s information is very illuminating. I highly recommend it.  0