okay, i know, tuners are evil. but you have to admit this thing is pretty neat:



it's a standard chromatic tuner, except instead of using a microphone, you clip it onto the headstock and it determines the pitch by picking up vibrations from the wood. pretty useful for tuning in noisy environments, or when other people are playing, since it's unaffected by surrounding noise.

Looks good, but if you are in a noisy environment would it not be distorted by other noises or how you are holding the neck of the guitar.

well, i haven't tested it anywhere noisy yet, but i'd imagine that the vibration of the instrument itself would be louder than any caused by other nearby instruments. (unless you're trying to tune at a drum & bass club, perhaps, but i don't think that's likely to be an issue.) it doesn't seem to be affected by 'dampening' the sound, either--it gives the same pitch however i'm holding it.

I know a guitarist who uses one of these in the middle of very noisy sessions and has no problem with it picking up the vibrations of his instrument only. It seems very effective indeed.

Now if only we could get him to understand that he has to be in tune with US and not his tuner (the minute a piper turns up to a session, the tuning goes haywire anyway!) - he does have a little bit of a tendency to tune to the tuner and happily play away without realising at all that he's a quarter of a tone flat.

Ear training, man! Ear training!

Let us know how it works in a noisy environment, River!

we usually have a couple of box players and a piper (scottish smallpipes)--come to think of it, i haven't noticed if they ever manage to play at the same time... the piper seems to switch to low whistle for a lot of tunes. fortunately the mandolin and banjo seem to tune to A=440 (with a tuner) and they sound in tune with everything else, so i figure i should be okay ;-)

oh, this thing can tune to anything from A=430 to A=449, and goes up to 4 semitones flat in 1 semitone steps (useful for capo'ing). i suppose that means i could tune to someone else, then calibrate the tuner to keep in tune from then on...

I have one of the earlier ones (bit bigger but the same principle) and it is superb. Yes you could use it to tune your mandolin on stage in the middle of a Led Zep gig. Plus you can get versions of the current one (as pictured) with clips to fit woodwinds too.