Guitar Tuners Electric

Electric Guitar Tuners – What You Need to Know

The best way to tune an electric guitar is with an electric guitar tuner. Consistently using an electric guitar tuner is one of the best practices that a beginner guitarist can follow. To understand the value of an electric guitar tuner, it is insightful to consider people who make a living playing guitar. Most professionals use an electric guitar tuner because they understand that it is important to be in tune and they know that using an electric guitar tuner is the best way to get, and stay, in tune.

The first time I played guitar was when I borrowed a friend’s guitar in college. The friend came over after a bit to see how I was doing. I strummed a few chords I had been practicing. He appeared to be in pain. The guitar was way out of tune. I had never really played a musical instrument before so I lacked the ability to hear that the instrument was no longer in tune.

Some parts of playing the guitar are obvious, for example: fretting chords, picking, strumming, etc. What is not so obvious is that developing a musical ear is just as important. Consistently playing in tune will improve a beginner’s musical ear. On the other side of the coin, playing out of tune will, not surprisingly, reduce the speed at which a beginner will develop his or her ear. Making matters worse, many beginners do not want to spend much on their first guitar. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics of a cheaply-made guitar is that it goes out of tune easily. The result can be real frustration.

It used to be that many people used the Boss TU-2 electric guitar tuner as their go-to tuner. The accuracy of a guitar tuner is measured in terms of cents – 1/100 of the distance between consecutive notes. The problem with the TU-2 electric guitar tuner was its accuracy which was +/- 3 cents. If you have a highly trained musical ear, you can hear a 3 cents difference. Furthermore, if two people playing together are tuning with different TU-2 tuners, they could be as far off as 6 cents, which definitely is not good.

Not too long ago, Peterson strobe tuners were the professional guitarists tuner of choice. Former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash used to use a Peterson strobe tuner (although he has since switched). Another guitarist who used Peterson strobe tuners is Andy Timmons – a popular guitarists’ guitarist. The Peterson strobe tuners were accurate to +/- 1 cent. However, there were a couple bad characteristics of the Peterson strobe tuners. First, they cost too much. Second, they appeared to have a quality-control issue. If you search the internet, you can easily find several stories of people who bought the electric guitar tuner and, a short while later, it stopped working.

Recently, guitarists are benefitting from a new generation of electric guitar tuners. They are highly accurate (+/- 1 cent), durable and relatively inexpensive.

About the Author

Dan Denton is a guitar enthusiast with twenty plus years experience. Read more of Dan’s opinions on electric guitar tuners, including the make and model of the best electric guitar tuner on the market. If you are a beginning guitarist, you may also be interested in Dan’s advice on purchasing a high-quality electric guitar pack.

How to use an electronic guitar tuner to tune your guitar.

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