On 08/17/2013 06:52 AM, Herbert Ward wrote:
I bought a Planet-Waves optical tuner. It shines a strobe light on your string while you're tuning.
Sounds like a really nice tuner.
Unfortunately, it has only the six guitar notes EADGBE, so it's limited in usefulness for a 440 lute, and even more so for a 415 lute.
That sounds very short-sighted on the part of the manufacturer. I can't imagine any way that it had to do with cost or programming limitations. I am guessing that it was a limitation of the mind of the designer.
Yes, I know you're suppose to learn to tune by ear.
I was a purist about this for a long time, until I bought a classical guitar with a digital chromatic tuner built in. It's particularly convenient during the week or two after installing new strings. Nylon guitar strings will slack about a half-step per day for the first few days, and I found that I could bring myself back to correct pitch on all strings in a very short span of time. The ear still comes into play however, because any guitar I've owned will have small manufacturing quirks affecting tuning that I come to learn and compensate for by finding a closest agreement between two conflicting intervals. The ear also comes into play of course, once one learns how to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of tuning problems found in particular pieces, or to make the commonly found adjustments that help the more important intervals found in any particular key to be in acceptable accord. Tobiah To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
