Thinking of making my own stomp box tuner... is it a good idea?

[Bunkey]

D'Addario clip-on tuners are pretty great at £7-ish.

I'd never even considered clip-ons before I got one - Yes they're accurate.

It just lives on the guitar now.

[GibsonGM]

A person COULD do it, I suppose....with a crystal oscillator to provide a standard, and a bunch of other stuff.   After 20 years of dabbling in electronics...I bet I MIGHT be able to make a tuner, yeah!  It would most likely be affected by temperature, vibration and things, and fit in a cigar box...would take me 100 hours of work, and 50 more thinking...for 70 lb., I think ready-made is your best bet!    And as Bunkey said, a nice cheap clip-on works well.    And in a used gear forum, you may well find a Boss Tuner for <70.   

[Rob Strand]

It would most likely be affected by temperature, vibration and things,

If you have a 4MHz crystal you have a lot of dividers and the problem of getting it to come out at 440Hz (for example).
One of those 32768kHz resonators or crystals would reduce the dividers but then you have an accuracy problem
from the start 32768/74 = 442.8Hz  and 32768/75 = 436.9Hz about +/- 1% 

In a squeeze you might get a NE555 with a regulated supply and perhaps a magic combination of parallel polypropylene and polyester caps to cancel the temperature coefficient.  Grandma's recipe might be two dashes of polypropylene to one dash of polyester.

There's plenty of apps for mobile phones but normally they use the mic as input.  (Not all would be trustworthy either).

(But yeah, just buy one.)

[CodeMonk]

Like GibsonGM, I have been dabbling in electronics for quite awhile (since about 1980), and I think he's being overly optimistic.
I've built pedals that fit in damn near every effects pedal category you can think of. And many that can't really be categorized (Unless you consider "What the @#$% was that?" a category).

It's not a project I would want to do, or recommend.
Way to much work for a one off pedal.
And this coming from someone that designs and etches circuit boards (Some are double sided) for one off pedals (I do find PCB design to be very therapeutic though).

[Radical CJ]

... After 20 years of dabbling in electronics...I bet I MIGHT be able to make a tuner, yeah!  It would most likely be affected by temperature, vibration and things, and fit in a cigar box...would take me 100 hours of work, and 50 more thinking...for 70 lb...

That about sums it up. I only have 20 months of dabbling in electronics and was curious about whether it could be done. My investigation turned up a few possibilities of diy things that would respond to changes in pitch, but nothing that would be remotely useful for the purpose of reliably tuning a guitar, especially in a performance situation. And in fact I doubt anything I could have built would be any better than just tuning by ear.

I recently bought a Polytune3 which I'm happy with but like other tuner pedals they are pricey. Clip-ons and other cheap plastic box options do the job just fine and I've used these for most of my 20 years of playing guitar.   

[merlinb]

You can buy a Chinese pedal tuner for less than £20, what more do you need?

[amz-fx]

The Donner DT-2 is a nice little tuner for only $10 from Amazon. I bought several different clip-on tuners back in January to use on my guitars and they all were decent.

However, if you want to read about dividing oscillator signals down into musical notes, you should check out Tom's article at https://electricdruid.net/adventures-in-top-octave-generation/

regards, Jack

[marcelomd]

D'Addario clip-on tuners are pretty great at £7-ish.

I'd never even considered clip-ons before I got one - Yes they're accurate.

It just lives on the guitar now.

I have one of these. Really good for guitar. But as with almost any tuner, it struggles to pick the low B on bass. The only one tuner I tried that works reliably with the low B is a Korg pedal.

That said, one possibility is to get a cheap clip tuner and rehouse it in a pedal. IIRC you can connect the signal wire directly to the transducer. Maybe isolate it with a JFET buffer.

[duck_arse]

30 years ago, we'd get a top octave generator chip and make a stroboscopic tuner from one of the magazines.


how come bot generated topics get everone talking, instead of deleting?

[iainpunk]

welcome to the forum.

i tried building a tuner pedal a few years ago, together with a class mate who is obsessed with CMOS logic.
we planned it to be based off of a bunch of oscillators tuned to the correct pitches. and then compare phase kinda like a PLL, select the closest matching one with some logic, output the difference between the best matching phase and the input frequency in the form of 3 LED's. red for too high, blue for too low and green only lit when the frequency's matched.
we never got it to work just right, it wasn't really selective enough, causing it to output total chaos when really close to the correct pitch and the oscillators seemed to drift over time.

i do not recommend trying to build one, get a 3$ clip-on tuner from ebay.

cheers, Iain

[Mark Hammer]

It wasn't all that long ago that some solid-state amps would come with a built-in tuner of sorts.  It wuldn't tell you if you were tuned up. It would simply give you a standard A-440 and perhaps a few other relevant pure tones, and leave the rest up to the user. Of course, if one was lousy at comparing the pitch of said oscillator and your instrument, to determine if the instrument/string was sharp or flat, it couldn't save you.

[blackieNYC]

Do clip on tuners freak out if a bass player is playing while you try to tune a guitar? From excessive vibrations?

[antonis]

It would simply give you a standard A-440

Pas mal..
(unless you're a honoured member of Boston Symphonic Orchestra with A=444Hz pitch..)

[iainpunk]

i have a pickup ring tuner in my black mini-explorer, really amazing to have, never have to search for where in my bedroom i left it last time i played guitar, especially when i was drunk last time playing.

it has a tiny little switch next to the led display, hard to push with thick fingers, but a pick makes it easy!
ill be putting it on to more guitars when i have the cash.

also, building a ''strobe tuner'' wouldn't be too hard right?

cheers

edit: how do i make an image smaller?

[marcelomd]

edit: how do i make an image smaller?

I used to do:

Code Select Expand

[img height=xxx]https://blah...[/img]

[PRR]

....edit: how do i make an image smaller?

http://www.picresize.com/

https://www.irfanview.com

[CodeMonk]

You wouldn't believe how many image hits Google will turn up for "sniper bunny"!   

found a few with "PHD Kitten"