Guitar gears are expensive. These post will illustrate how to save money on guitar gears for your home studio. Having a home studio is getting cheaper each day because of the advancement in the technology and the rise of many software plug in solutions. Below are the guitar related tuner gears that saves me money a lot while it produces such good quality that I cannot afford to lose.
Digital Guitar tuners – this is very important in music studio applications, take note that once an engineer will bypass the digital guitar tuners and will tune by ear,this will increase the risk of out tune songs. I will trust my ear for mixing but not for tuning the guitar. Tuning the guitar is sometimes hard especially if you do not have balance or flat guitar. Balance or flat means that the tuning will not change from fret to fret. So if an E is tune on the open 6th string. It should give also a perfect E note on the 12 fret 6th string. Other guitars do not have this ability and that is why a digital guitar tuner is recommended.
As seen on the screen shot you can customize the tuning digitally, so tuning half step or standard as well as other tuning variations is highly possible. The good thing about Digital tuner is that it is FREE. To use digital guitar tuner you must have the following requirements:
a. Windows Based Computer
b. Soundcard with line input or microphone input
c. Some hard disk space to install digital guitar tuner (it will only consume a little resources).
Below are the important procedures to use Digital Guitar Tuner:
a. Connect the electric guitar to your Windows Based computer using the sound input or microphone input.
b. Open the Digital tuner and configure the system, test whether the input is loud enough.
c. Look for “tuner is on” then you are ready to tune the guitar, this is very easy to use.
Since this is a free application it can fail sometimes like hang. To correct this is to restart your computer and start all over again, but it wont hurt the computer. Double check this program before installing as it comes from different sources, it may have spy wares in it.
The program has some setbacks. It cannot tune a bass guitar!!! So be careful with this , make sure you are only using this for acoustic and electric guitar and not for bass guitar tuning applications.
If you need a bass guitar tuner I highly recommend to have a hardware tuner for this, not a software one. And if you are very gifted you can even tune a bass guitar by ears, but this is not recommended as I have tried before and bass tuning is a pain in the ass.
Please read my post about learning all the notes in acoustic guitar. So that you can have a complete guide on the notes of the guitar for which you would like to tune. Below is a photo of the bass guitar, which obvious follows different notes on different frets compared to the acoustic/electric guitar. It is because the bass guitar is a 4 string instrument:
Notes of Bass Guitar: E-highest A- D- G-lowest