Shar Chromatic Tuner

The tuner is great and working very well...

This is the perfect tuner for beginners! Uncomplicated, won't change tuning pitches on students like other tuners that can tune in different keys. I'd like to see this style come out with a simple metronome combination. On the side it could have a dial with tempo marking for changing tempo and one to adjust the volume, nothing else.

This tuner may be ideal for beginners who have no tuning experience and no help available and have the 4-tuner tailpiece necessary for steel strings. (Peg tuning lacks fine adjustment and will cause frustration and poor results). It will introduce the beginner to the tuning process initially through sight, which hopefully will pass on to the ears over time. The beginner will become aware of bowing problems by seeing pitch differences between up and down bows. An advanced player, given an A will rapidly tune an instrument to beat-free perfect fifths, and will find this tuner painfully slow. It is limited to a 440 Hz A, a long time standard but a 442 pitch is often used in the USA and some countries, such as Japan, use 444 or higher. If this is a problem one should select one of many tuners where the A frequency can be selected. Design is clever, there is no doubt as to whether the tuner has been turned on or off, replacement AAA batteries are readily available. Construction is reasonably solid but... Caution! Modern electronics are wonderful but most of these small compact devices are easily damaged, generally beyond repair, when dropped or mishandled which frequently cracks a circuit board.

So I'm actually a French Horn player. Which means my native key is F. But most tuners have an LCD display that tells you what C based pitch it is detecting. The nice thing about this tuner is that it has a separate LED for each pitch. What's nice about that is I can put a sticker over the top of the printed pitch with my transposed note name. So I don't have to think in my head what concert pitch is my G. Much less opportunity to make a mistake.