The 10 Best Guitar Tuners

You Can Tune A Guitar, But You Can't Tuna Fish

What makes a quality tuner is accuracy and features, more than anything else.

Don't Bypass The Features

Let's return to the nightmare scenario from above and assume that you've actually been blessed with an understanding audience. In fact, the rock 'n roll gesture with which you accounted for your guitar's horrendous tuning actually made them feel like they were part of the show, like they were in on a private moment between you and them that anyone without a ticket didn't get.

Then, you go to tune your guitar before restarting the song, but you made the classic mistake of running your guitar through a channel that forces the audience to listen to the slow, agonizing sound of a guitar string gradually being tuned.

There are four types of tuners on our list, each of which has an advantage over the other.

If you knew better, you'd have made sure that the tuner you purchased had a bypass channel that would silence your guitar while the tuner's in use. That way, your ministrations would only torture the tuner itself, and not your potential fans.

But that's just one possible feature you can find on these tuners, and evaluating both the feature sets and the housings of the tuners on our list will quickly narrow your options down to just a few.

There are four types of tuners on our list, each of which has an advantage over the other. One tuner is quite possibly the simplest type, and it's the first tuner I ever used when playing guitar. It's a table-top tuner that sits on any surface and listens to your guitar through a small microphone on its body. It's a simple, inexpensive style that's great for new guitarists.

Another popular, inexpensive tuner for guitarists new and old is the head-mount type. This tuner attaches to the headstock of your guitar and uses the vibrations of the instrument to measure its tuning. These are fine units, but they don't automatically bypass your signal, so you have to remember to turn your guitar down in a live setting to keep your tuning process quiet.

The other two types are distinctly more professional, in the pedal box and rack-mounted styles. Unless you're running a very expensive live operation or a nice recording studio, rack mounted devices don't make a ton of sense. The average gigging guitarist doesn't want to lug that much extra hardware around, especially now that engineers can cram such high quality electronics into smaller pedals, many of which are wonderfully accurate and laden with features.

Frequently Setting The Standard

Before electronic tuning was an option, and before any actual standards existed for the designation of musical pitches, before Heinrich Hertz was ever born, there was the tuning fork and the pitch pipe. Both invented in the 18th century, these implements could set a momentary standard among instrumentalists gathered around the same one, but if you took a tuning fork from Germany and a pitch pipe from England in 1826, they would likely have had noticeably different frequencies.

Eventually, the governments of Austria and France agreed upon the measurement of 435 Hz for A4, or the fourth A on a standard piano.

After Hertz discovered and developed a system for measuring sound by its frequency, musical and scientific organizations argued about where to set the standard for musical tuning. Eventually, the governments of Austria and France agreed upon the measurement of 435 Hz for A4, or the fourth A on a standard piano.

In 1926, the music industry in America settled on 440 Hz as the proper frequency for A4. Ten years later, the American Standards Association agreed, followed in 1955 by the then relatively young International Organization for Standardization.

With this standard in place, manufacturers developed electronic tuners that compared a guitar's signal to the strobe frequency of a flashing light. In recent years, however, digital tuners have steadily replaced the strobe method, and proven more accurate and less expensive.

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