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Guitar Tuner

By Leslie Elliott


A quality guitar tuner is a crucial tool in any guitarist's gig bag. A typical acoustic guitar has six strings, each of which is adjusted to produce a specific pitch (or musical note). While there are many varieties of guitar tunings, the strings on a standard guitar are tuned, from lowest to highest note, as follows: E-A-D-G-B-E.

I played guitar for the first time when I was in college when a friend let me borrow his guitar. After a some time, the friend came over to look in on me. I strummed a few chords I had been practicing. He cringed. Because I had been playing so much, the instrument was out of tune, way out of tune. I had never played a musical instrument before so I lacked the ability to hear that the instrument had gone out of tune.

That's where an electronic guitar tuner comes in. The main function of an electronic tuner is to automatically determine the pitch a string is producing and to visibly indicate whether that pitch is sharp (high), flat (low), or "in tune."

Not surprisingly, continually playing on an instrument that is out of tune will prevent a beginner from developing his or her musical ear at a normal rate. Making matters worse, many beginners do not want to spend much on their first guitar and therefore they end up with a cheaply made guitar that goes out of tune easily. The result can be real frustration.

Open Tunings: This is where a chord can be strummed without fretting or fingering the individual notes. This would be used typically when a slide is employed in styles such as steel guitar and bottleneck playing. These were the tunings employed in blues music that was so influential in moulding the music of artists such as Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones.

Many people, including myself, are fans of the late Davy Graham who was greatly travelled and used these influences in his guitar playing and writing. He is probably best known for DADGAD tuning which he used so he could play along with musicians in Morocco, even though it is essentially a Celtic tuning (the global power of music!). This in turn ended up influencing Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin on songs such as Kashmir.

Despite the good accuracy, there were a couple problems with the Peterson strobe tuners, however. First, they were just downright expensive. Second, the quality of the product was not always high. There are a number of stories on the web where people have bought these tuners and they stopped working in relatively short order.




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