From cheap to expensive

Most beginning banjo students don’t know all of the in’s and out’s of tuning their instrument, and most aren’t very well-versed on the different tools available to them to help get the job done. Being a touring, working musician, I’ve been exposed to some of the intricacies of what it takes to work with, care for, tune, and otherwise manipulate a musical instrument. Over the years I’ve always wanted to invest the money in a professional grade tuner but haven’t had the budget. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a very affordable option recently.

Ever heard of a stroboscope?

It seems to me that there is one industry standard tuner that most professionals go for, whether that be a professional piano tuner, electric instrument musician, wind instrument player, or even banjo player. What I’m referring to here is a stroboscopic tuner, more commonly referred to as a strobe tuner. Is this a new term for you? I’ve known of this type of tuner for many many years, but I didn’t know much about this grade of tuner until recently. I’ve more or less always known that high-end pro’s use a “strobe” tuner…and that I couldn’t afford one. That’s about where my knowledge ended.

The first stroboscope’s were made in 1932 by the Conn company, and they were bulky and cumbersome. An article I read about them says that they were housed in two record-player-sized cases. Certainly a far cry from the miniaturized tools of today! Perhaps one of the most famous makers of strobe tuners, Peterson, introduced their first tuner in the late 60′s. By this time the size had come down quite a bit.

Stroboscope’s are mechanical devices, not digital devices like the tuner you likely use. They rely on a series of drive motors and rotating display wheels, as well as display lights, to indicate what note is being played by an instrument. The wonder of a strobe tuner is that they go far deeper into the harmonic ranges of the note and let you fine tune the note to a .cent of the herz of the signal being produced. Sound like gibberish and Greek? Don’t sweat it, just understand that you can fine tune using a strobe with much greater accuracy and depth. Stroboscope’s are the tools to have, however, they have two rather large drawbacks: first, they are expensive…many thousands of dollars. Secondly, they require regular servicing to keep everything calibrated. Again…not cheap to service.

With the advent of the electronic age, we’ve seen many tools miniaturized and shrunk. We’ve seen mechanical items switched over to digital, and the stroboscope certainly followed suit. What most people use today is what’s known as a virtual stroboscope, or virtual strobe. It’s virtual because an LCD screen is used to simulate the moving wheels and lights.

The tuner you see at the left is about the size of a book; it’s more of a table-top model tuner than what you are likely used to tuning with. I’ve been seeing the pro’s use these blue-cased tuners for years, at least from a distance, yet have never seen one close up. If you pay close attention to the stage gear of some of your favorite performers, you may see one of these setting upright somewhere near the rest of the gear behind the musicians. For high tech, big-rig acts like pro rock groups and others that use racks of electronics, you’ll find that these musicians have yet a different model strobe tuner…one that is “rack mounted”. This tuner fits into the rack along with the other electronic gear, and you might say it resembles a stereo receiver in the way it looks.

The strobe tuner is likely over-kill for you and me!

All this talk of high-end tuners and big dollar, precision items is above and beyond the average parking lot picker. It’s even above the average garage-band member. Most of us get along just fine with the current, low-end, commercially-available electronic tuners out there. Are you surprised to hear me call your $50 tuner low-end? Now you know why!

The Korg or the Intellitouch or the *fill in the blank with your tuner name brand here* tuner that you currently use is likely sufficient for what you need it to do. Most of the tuners us pickers are using are light-weight and portable, with several nice features, the best one of which is…they are affordable! However, the deeper you go into your art form, the more you may begin to develop a hankerin’ for something more high-end, especially if you begin getting some exposure as a musician. As an example of the higher-end pricing that you’ll pay for a strobe, the blue tuner you see in the picture retails at Elderly Instruments for $250 as of this writing. You probably need to be pretty devoted to your art form to spend $250 on a tuner!

Click me! Click me!

I’ve been ready for an upgrade for awhile

I feel fortunate to be gaining some regional prominence on the banjo, and I maintained a fairly heavy gig schedule in 2009. I make a fair chunk of my income playing or teaching banjo, and with the advent of my website and blog, I’m gaining a worldwide audience. All of these factors and more have had me hankerin’ for a better tuner. Playing at a higher level of musicianship leads you to begin to understand the intricate and inherant weaknesses of the typical clamp on digital tuners that we’re all used to. My tuners have been frustrating me for many years now for a lot of reasons. That being said, my acquaintance Doug Lindhout showed me a virtual strobe tuner that he uses which is fairly small, has a flip-top lid, and a clamp on alligator clip style pick-up for tuning in noisy environments. This tuner sells for a couple of hundred dollars, and I had my sights set on this tuner. That is, until…

I found a strobe tuner for $10!!

You read that right folks. $10. I couldn’t believe it. You see, I’m an iPhone user, and one day I did a random search for the term “banjo” in the app store at iTunes, and lo and behold, up pops an application made by Peterson, called: iStrobosoft. This is a virtual strobe tuner program written to be used on an iPhone and iPod Touch, for the amazing price of $10.

This application uses the iPhone’s built in microphone (the one used during phone calls) to hear the instrument you are trying to tune, or an external microphone that you plug in in the case of an iPod Touch. For both setups, what I recommend are adapter cables and alligator clip pickup sold by Peterson that turns the tuner into a vibration style tuner so that you can tune in a noisy environment.

The drawback for many of you is that you don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, but believe me, it’s worth picking up either one to have access to this very affordable strobe tuner, if you are a serious musician. (Not to mention that there are many other iPhone apps for the banjo in the iTunes store. See my website to see a list of the banjo-specific iPhone apps at www.banjosrule.com.)

What a difference this tuner has made

Ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not: my frustrations with tuning have all but melted away. I am never without my iPhone and so always have my tuner with me, and the level and depth to which this software fine tunes is phenomenal. That phrase “tunes to the nearest .cent” turns out to make a fairly earth-shattering difference in how in-tune your instrument is. I used it for the first time at band practice just two nights before writing this, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Now, there is something to be said for having this device in my hand or on a table, and having to plug in a cord and clamp the clip to my banjo. The old Intellitouch I was using was self-contained, portable, and the entire thing clung to my banjo, even while playing. This new setup is a little less convenient, but…it produces the result I’m after. I’ll likely use the clamp on style in a pinch or when I’m walking around a festival, but I’ll rely heavily on the new strobe setup on my iPhone as my main tuner.

Over at the Peterson website (www.petersontuners.com) you can hear the difference between an instrument tuned with a low-end tuner, and one tuned with a strobe tuner. There’s a link on the home page that’ll take you to the comparison test, and I was surprised. It’s a major difference. Makes me want to throw the Intellitouch in the trash. But I won’t.

Do you have any thoughts on tuning and tuners for the banjo?

I‘d love to hear what your experiences and preferences have been. Were you aware of the different levels of tuner you can buy? Have you heard of a strobe tuner? Do you use anything high-end, or do you stick with the common low-end equipment that most of us use? Remember, for most of us who “hobby pick”, we won’t be in need of anything so high end. But the deeper you go into the art form, the more you’ll start wanting the right tools and techniques to get the most out of your playing. And heck…with a $10.00, high-end tuner, even someone who’s only had a lesson or two can afford to jump right to the tuner that the pro’s use!

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