Tuners and Metronomes

TUNERS AND METRONOMES

Life is too short for bad tuning! With a good tuner, it's easy to always keep your guitar, bass, ukulele - or any other instrument - tuned correctly. There are basically three types of tuners, and the difference lies in how they ‘listen’ to your instrument. They can either do this by receiving the signal through a jack plug, by listening to the instrument through a microphone, or by sensing the vibrations by being placed on the head of a string instrument.

All types work well if used in the right situations. It doesn’t make much sense to stand with a tuner that has a built-in microphone if you are on a large stage with a lot of noise. On the other hand, such a tuner can be very precise if you are tuning an acoustic instrument in quiet surroundings. The latest addition is tuners that can sense an instrument's vibrations - and they usually work really well in noisy environments too. One advantage of them is that the instrument doesn’t need to be plugged into an amplifier or turned up - and furthermore, they take up very little space in the guitar case. So when you are backstage without your pedalboard, the tuner that is attached to the head of the guitar can still help with a final tuning before you go on stage.

But the right tuning doesn’t help if the tempo drops. With a metronome, you can practice keeping the tempo or check your progress when you are practicing difficult techniques. Many tuners have a built-in metronome. The tempo of a metronome is set in BPM - which stands for Beats Per Minute - so at 100BPM, there are 100 beats in a minute.

Both tuners and metronomes are important tools for the musician, so always make sure to have one in your instrument case!