Digital Guitar Tuners | Acoustic Guitar Player

Talking About Tuners

Jun 11th, 2008 by Mike

Tune It or Die slogan "Tune it or Die!", a great slogan I saw on a t-shirt at a session recently. If you are playing by yourself, as long as the guitar is in tune with itself it doesn't matter too much. Or does it? I find that by always keeping my guitars at concert pitch my ear improves. I am better at recognizing pitches, which helps when I try to transcribe music.

When you are playing with others it helps if you are all at the same pitch (and so avoid trouble from the guy with the t-shirt). Digital guitar tuners make it easy to be in pitch. I remember the pitch pipes I started with, blow a little too hard and the pitch would change. As a beginner this was a nightmare, I think my guitar was only really in tune when I was with my guitar teacher. With the digital tuners this is no longer an issue and even an absolute beginner can keep their guitar in tune.

I've used a number of digital tuners over the years but for the last 5 years or so I've used an Intellitouch PT1 , which clips onto the headstock. It has the advantage that you can retune even when there is a lot of noise around, something that you can't do with a tuner that has a microphone. It is also chromatic, so it's easy to get to DADGAD from standard. It's only real problem is with the low E-string which sometimes is slow to register. I can usually get to recognize E by playing the 12th fret harmonic, which is fine on my guitar as I know the intonation is perfect. I keep looking for an alternative clip on digital guitar tuner, but I've not found one yet as good as the Intellitouch.