let's talk Strobe tuners then... (POLL)

[nealescott]

i've always wanted one of these...

not for ease of use, convenience, practicality, efficiency, or anything like that, just cuz it looks so darn cool...

[noirengineer]

I use the sweetened tunings, they just compensate over the strings to make everything sound a bit more musical

thanks for this post yannis.. but i'm still kinda confused on what a
'sweetened tuning' actually is, or a temperament for that matter!
How is it used and what exactly would you use it for!?  
Could you give me a specific example perhaps?

[zhivago]

ummm...I'm not sure exactly how to describe it....

imagine this, you get a tuner, a very good tuner and you tune the guitar perfectly (or as perfectly as it gets anyway)

after that point, you could still fine tune the already in theory perfectly tuned guitar until it sounds good to your ear...

you might detune something ever so slightly and tune up something else a bit.

kinda how Seymour Duncan has them tips on his website about how to get a three-saddle Telecaster in tune.


the sweetened tuning, to my ears, does the above tuning + fine-tuning in a preset way, so it speeds things up...I find that a guitar that's tuned like that actually sounds a tad louder (feel free to call me crazy! )

to further confuse things, there is a tuning for acoustic guitars...this must be something similar to the sweetened tunings - I haven't used i though, as I don't have a pickup on the J50 (I actually tune it by ear most of the time)

hope the above helps a bit

[noirengineer]

Actually.. that makes PERFECT sense! 
lol thanks again.. it pretty much summed it..

[zhivago]

excellent!

I was a bit worried I was rambling on!

[Yagoo]

Yeah as said above the sweetened tunings just make a small adjustment to the pitch, so that the instrument sounds best when played in a particular mode. 

As for crapped out displays (I guess you mean on the Strobostomp), I only have experience with the SS1 and the display on mine keep working, but seemed to loose contrast. 

I think that the likelyhood of an SS1 failing in some way is high, the SS2 I believe had many issues addressed, so you'd hope these would be more reliable.  My V-SAM has never had an issue though.

[mezcalhead]

I use the sweetened tunings, they just compensate over the strings to make everything sound a bit more musical

thanks for this post yannis.. but i'm still kinda confused on what a
'sweetened tuning' actually is, or a temperament for that matter!
How is it used and what exactly would you use it for!? 
Could you give me a specific example perhaps?

Temperament has been causing problems in music for thousands of years. It's a pretty difficult thing to wrap your head around and I'm sure my understanding of it is incomplete but I'll give it a shot .. basically, to get a pure interval between two pitches you need a whole number ratio (2:1 for an octave, 3:2 for a fifth, 4:3 for a fourth and so on) but the intervals won't all add up properly if you start stacking a lot of them (bit more info on that here). Essentially you can tune an instrument exactly for one key but not so that it is exactly in tune in all keys.

I believe that in early music they would intonate their instruments exactly for whatever key they were playing in, known as "just intonation". Then during the Renaissance they started looking at systems of intonation which would allow one instrument to be nearly exactly in tune for all keys .. known as "well temperament" (thus Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier", a collection of exercises for the keyboard in all 24 keys).

So this partly explains what Yannis was saying - if you tune your guitar exactly for an open E major, the open G major will be out of tune. The guitar in particular has a few more issues than simply temperament, including the unwound G found on most modern electrics, the fact that strings go slightly out of tune when you hit them hard and so on. Also, as Yannis says, sometimes being slightly out of tune sounds more right than being exactly in tune .. especially since nearly all recorded guitar music has been played with imperfectly intonated instruments.

So in short my guess is that the sweetened tunings are there to make the guitar sound as close to well-tempered as possible. I guess the acoustic tuning is something to do with having a wound G.

[zhivago]

exactly

I used to go crazy when I was younger...I'd tune the guitar according to the tuner, and then some chords would be out of tune...I couldn't work out why.

over the years though, I read stuff, and tried fiddling with it all and got the hang of getting it as in-tune as it's ever gonna sound to my ears

nowadays, it can be really apparent on my Gibson acoustic...I'll have say, a perfect open E major...hit a D major and I fill like I'm chewing chalk or something... 

so then I fiddle here and there, and suddenly I find the sweetspot that works the best. 

[Yagoo]

All this talk of tuners got me looking at the pitchblack, and then the Turbo Tuners:



I think I am going to be buying one of each of these tuners when my bank account has recovered. 

If they live up to expectations, they should replace all my existing tuners.  I will also need to get a separate metronome though, to replace the one built into my V-SAM.

[noirengineer]

i am glad i started this thread .. 

thanks for the insight.