Electric Guitar Tuner

One of the most critical things to a good performance is being in tune.  No matter how well written of a musical piece or how good of a guitarist, an out of tune guitar will sound bad.  There are a variety of different ways to ensure an electric guitar is in tune, from electric guitar tuners to online guitar tuners to the more traditional tuning forks.

The uses and designs of these may all be very different, but the end result of all of them should be the same.   Tuning by ear is a good skill to have, but when other instruments are involved, even very tiny pitch issues can become quite noticeable.   At a minimum, having some sort of external reference source can ensure a more accurate and precise tuning.

Electric Guitar Tuners

Every electric guitarist really should own some version of this.   Decent handheld ones can be purchased for $10-20, are easy to carry around with any other equipment, and they work in situations where other ambient noise might interfere with hearing the actual guitar.

A performing guitarist may also want to seriously consider spending a bit more money and buying one of the pedal or rack versions, which are slightly more accurate, but more importantly can mute the guitar and allow the guitarist to tune in the unfortunate situation of a guitar going out of tune in the middle of the song.   The mute ensures that the audience isn’t being blasted by the sounds of the tuning process, and the visual reference means that the other musicians continuing the song won’t be a distraction.

Tuning By Reference

Using reference pitches is the more traditional way of tuning an instrument.   The chief advantage is that there are so many easily accessible, free methods of obtaining references pitches.   There are free online guitar tuners, not to mention that most guitar lessons dvd and other learning materials have these on them as well.

Unfortunately, those sorts of materials aren’t very practical outside a practice setting, but tuning forks are, not to mention most handheld electric guitar tuners also play reference tones as well.   In addition, other instruments may be used as a reference, usually a piano or keyboard, which generally hold their tuning more accurately than most other instruments.   The use of these is very straightforward, simply play the note the open string should be, and attempt to match it.

There are two choices when tuning with a reference, one is to only carry around a reference for one string (usually the lowest string, which in most cases is low E) and tune the rest by an ear method.   The other is to use a reference pitch for all of the strings.

With tuning forks, it is more practical to carry just one, but all of the other methods usually have all the reference tones needed built in, so it usually is a matter of preference rather than a practical issue.

Robot Guitars

Actually despite the amount of publicity this has gotten recently from the Gibson Robot Guitar release, this is actually a fairly old idea and technology that has been around for nearly twenty years.   As a purely tuning device, it really isn’t worthwhile, despite the advertising.

The advantage of these systems over things like tuning forks, electric guitar tuners, and online guitar tuners is the ability for a guitarist to quickly and accurately change the tuning of the guitar in the middle of a performance.

Most materials to learn how to play electric guitar also only have reference pitches for standard tuning, not alternate tunings.   For a guitarist that uses three, four, or more tunings in a set, this can be a nice alternative to having to carry around three or four guitars.   Using it purely as a tuning method is rather impractical though, given the cost and weight of these systems.