Cheap tuner?

[ggunn]

Of course, none of this matters when the instrument output is erratically wowing twenty cents or more.

That needle movement you see on a quartz tuner is not the pitch of the string moving around, it's an artifact of the filtering method that these tuners use to pick the fundamental out of a harmonically complex waveform. If you plug the same guitar into a Strobotuner and pluck the same string, you won't see that variation because it isn't really there.

 

[Light]

There is lab tests, and then there is real world performance.

If you are saying they are out of calibration, it's certainly possible that they are out of tune (as I pointed out) by several cents, but the cheapest tuners I know of that are still produced have accuracy well under a cent in matching a clean input to whatever their internal reference is, which is more than the human ear can accurately distinguish.

Of course, none of this matters when the instrument output is erratically wowing twenty cents or more.

So if I showed you a spec sheet saying my guitars would make you sound like Eric Clapton, would you believe that too?


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi

 

[bongolation]

That needle movement you see on a quartz tuner is not the pitch of the string moving around, it's an artifact of the filtering method that these tuners use to pick the fundamental out of a harmonically complex waveform.

That's categorically untrue: The frequency wow is not only there, you can often clearly hear it, especially as the notes get lower. On some basses, it's frequently downright ridiculous, enough to make you almost feel seasick listening to it.

You can vividly see it on an oscilloscope, irrespective of any tuner damping algorithms, as I pointed out in the previous message.

If any mechanical method of tuning minimizes the wow and produces a rock-solid tone out of a wobbling input, that is the artifact, actually.

 

[ggunn]

That's categorically untrue: The frequency wow is not only there, you can often clearly hear it, especially as the notes get lower. On some basses, it's frequently downright ridiculous, enough to make you almost feel seasick listening to it.

You can vividly see it on an oscilloscope, irrespective of any tuner damping algorithms, as I pointed out in the previous message.

If any mechanical method of tuning minimizes the wow and produces a rock-solid tone out of a wobbling input, that is the artifact, actually.

We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one.