I love this – it’s so simple, but for a casual guitarist like myself (and, um, every male who went to uni in the past three decades), it sounds like a perfect way to tune up quickly. The PolyTune is also able to tune all kinds of drop tunings, alternate tunings, open tunings, and probably even whatever the hell weird tuning the guitarist from My Bloody Valentine uses. It’s apparently accurate to 0.5 cents, which is good enough for my ears, and works with both guitar and bass. We don’t have pricing or availability info yet, but it should come pretty soon, since it’s being shown at the NAMM audio expo today. [TC Electronic via DVICE]
jack
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 9:05 PMTwo things why this really isn’t that great:
- You can still only tune one string at once. Yeah sure if you think only one string is out its good at a glance, but detuning to a different tuning or tuning more than one or two strings is going to be the same as regular
- “works with both guitar and bass” – Who the hell strums a Bass?
Christopher Watson
Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 10:35 AMI disagree. I think polyphonic tuners are the way ahead. Having worked as a live musician, sometime in a loud environment you can hear you are out of tune, but can’t pick where due to the noise. With this you can quickly pinpoint the area out of tune and tune only that string instead of having to go through every single one till you find the one that is out.
You are right on the non standard tuning thing. The next step for these tuners is programmability for non standard tunings.