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A guitar tuner is the best choice for your guitar tuning needs. Though you can always make use of your own ear to tune your guitar, a piano or a tuning fork perhaps, there's nothing as easy and reliable like a guitar tuner. There are many kinds of guitar tuners, let's start with the most common.

 

The Typical Guitar Tuner

These are the most common tuners of all. Portable / compact is a term often used to describe them but they don't have a specific name type. What I refer to as a typical guitar tuner is the little stand alone ones with a needle or digital display, including a built in mic and a line in jack. The main thing about these tuners is the option of using the built in mic or plugging the guitar straight into it. They are simple to use but many of them do have a common problem. When using the built in mic they aren't always as accurate or reliable as plugging the guitar in directly. This is actually the most common complaint with guitar tuners. They work fine on the high strings but on the Low E and sometimes the Low A string, they can have trouble detecting the pitch properly. If you look at the reviews you will find this same complaint with many makes and model of guitar tuner.

Clip On Guitar Tuner

Clip on guitar tuner is a bit more than just cool looking gadgets. You see these little things clipped on to the headstock of an acoustic guitar. There's actually a reason you might want one of these over the compact tuner. They work by picking up vibration in the guitar neck. Why would that matter? Because it means you can tune an acoustic guitar in a noisy environment. If you've ever been in a band then you already know it's impossible to shut up the drummer and bass player! This is what makes the clip on so useful. Plus let's face it, they look cool!

Stage Tuner

The stage tuner is pretty much what it says, it's for using on stage. The main difference with these is they are built tougher and should have a bright fairly large display so that you can still use it on a dimly lit stage. Also because most guitar / bass players play standing, with this tuner sitting on the floor you need to be able to see the display easily without bending down. The stage tuner has one other very important difference. They can be muted. The foot pedal isn't just an on off switch. When pedal is pressed and the tuner turned on, it mutes the output so that you can tune your guitar without driving the audience or other band members mad.

Bass Tuner

Most guitar tuners will claim to tune both bass and guitar. The truth is, you can tune pretty much any instrument with any tuner. The drawback only lies in it's ability to detect lower pitches, obviously making this a bigger problem for bass players than guitarists. Just like mentioned above, this can always be gotten around by tuning the harmonic, fifth or twelfth fret. This might be a bit more annoying for a bass guitar because slight discrepancies in intonation are more noticeable on a bass. If you are fairly experienced then this isn't likely to be much of a problem but it does make more sense to buy a more expensive tuner with a good reputation for tuning a bass.

Chromatic Tuner

Not all guitar tuners are chromatic. It might not matter to you if you are a beginner but in all honesty, all tuners should be chromatic. If you are desperate for simplicity and want the tuner to tell you the note names relating to the string you are tuning then the non chromatic might not be a terrible choice. For anything else, you should avoid them. There are two things that cannot be done on a standard non chromatic guitar tuner. You cannot check intonation and you can't easily use it to tune the guitar to a non standard tuning. This mostly applies to cheap guitar tuners. The more expensive chromatic tuners give you the option to use in guitar mode or chromatic.

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