Cheap Guitar Tuner

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Every aspiring guitarist should have an arsenal of essential equipment and included in that arsenal should be a guitar tuner. It is crucially important to play the guitar only when it is in tune so that over time the ear is trained to identify when the guitar is out of tune. There’s nothing worse than getting on stage and striking an out of tune chord, especially when the instruments of the other members of your band are pitch perfect. You’ll die of embarrassment and your reputation as a serious musician will be left in tatters.

Tuners can be very expensive because of the complex electronics inside them which has to be accurate enough to analyze a signal and identify its frequency in order to tell if it is in tune, however there is also a great selection of fully functional affordable tuners which will do the job just fine. Here we take a look at a few of them.

Korg GA-40 Large Display Guitar and Bass Tuner
The first cheap guitar tuner we’re going to look at is the Korg GA-40. Korg are renowned for making excellent music products including keyboards, electric pianos and metronomes.
The Korg GA-40 tuner has some excellent features. First of all it has this excellent large display which is just fantastic because it makes everything on its LCD screen just so easy to see unlike some smaller tuners.
It is very simple and very effecive with both an LED indicator and a digital meter to indicate if your guitar is sharp, flat or in tune.
There are four buttons on the front of the Korg GA-40. These are On/Standby, Guitar/Bass, Flat and Sound. They are quite self explanatory really. The Guitar/Bass button simply switches between 6 and 7 string guitars and and 6 string electric basses. The ‘Flat’ button allows you to set the tuner slightly flat so that you can tune all of your instrument’s strings to be a semitone or more down. This is a useful feature as some songs and musicians, especially in rock and metal, use this for their deep, powerful sound.
The ‘Sound’ button allows you to reference the correct pitch of the tone that is played from the built in speaker.  This function is fantastic because it means you can still tune your guitar by ear and therefore train it to recognise what a correctly tuned note should sound like.
The Korg GA-40 is incredibly light and portable meaning that you can slip it into your gig back or even your pocket so that you’ll never be without it and always be able to keep your guitar or bass in tune.

Qwik Tune Guitar Professor Chord Finder
We absolutely love multi-functional guitar gadgets that are great value and save time and money. Qwik Tune Guitar Professor is one such product that does just that. As its name suggests it is a guitar tuner as well as a chord computer with 250 chords stored in it, so once you have tuned up, you can use it as a tool to reference any chords that you are unsure of!
What’s also great about the Qwik Tune Guitar Professor you can tune your guitar by plugging it in or by using the built-in pitch pipe which will emit a tone matching the exact frequency of each of the guitar’s strings. This is great because iy gives you the option of tuning your guitar by ear which is a great skill that will help you to develop a critical ear and therefore help you progress as a musician. You can select between these three excellent features at the pusch of a button. A great 3-in-1 guitar tuner packed with some great features that fits neatly in your palm.  

Planet Waves SOS Guitar Tuner
Now this is one cool, space age guitar gadget, the Planet Waves SOS Guitar Tuner. It doesn’t work like a conventional tuner so you don’t plug your guitar into it and it doesn’t pick up the audio signal or frequency of the strings, instead it’s a light based tuner.
The Planet Waves SOS Guitar Tuner emits two out of phase beams of red light which you point at your plucked, vibrating guitar string. If the string is out of tune then you will see the lights moving erratically. As you tune the string up or down and approach the correct frequency the lights will slow down and eventually stop moving completely.
The unit itself has a smart ergonomic design which is basically the shape of a pick or plectrum meaning it can be held easily and is incredibly small for such a smart tool.
This is far from just a gimmick as the visual tuning system means that you can quickly tune up your guitar in dark and/or noisy environments and without having to actually plug your guitar into it. Perfect for a quick tune up before a gig.

If you liked these products, check out what we have to say about clip on tuners.

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