Guitar Tuner project/DIY?

Has anyone built a diy guitar tuner?
I just thought it might be fairly simple and cheap, considering a korg rack tuner costs big bucks...

Does anyone have a schematic?

Well i never came across such a project. But i don't know if it's worthwile to think about this. I mean yes those Korg rack tuners are expensive but you can buy them used for a much better price.
DIY one could be quite hard since i never saw those big "meters" anywhere for sale. And also considering a rack case isn't cheap you end up with quite a sum.
I would buy a used one, seems to be the best way.

Flo

I saw one on the web a few years ago it used a microcontroller IIRC.

The big problem with building a tuner is finding the fundamental in the harmonic mess of a plucked string.

In the USA you can find a LCD Korg as cheap as about $20.00. It is a cheap model but it works ok. A Boss TU 12 is not too bad a price <$80.00 IIRC.

You could get a small model tuner with leds and rack it, remove the old leds and connect the outputs to high brightness leds in the panel maybe do the same with the switches.

If you want to DIY one a model like the older peterson strobe tuners or new microcontroller model would be cool.

I unsiccessfully looked into this awhile back. Everywhere I looked or asked I got the "what for?" response so I ended up abandoning the search. If for nothing more than intelectual curiosity I think it is worthwhile to look into though. I don't think it would turn out to be cost effective, but maybe fun.

[quote author="Infernal_Death"]I would buy a used one, seems to be the best way.

Flo[/quote]

Geeze... what kind of DIY spirit is that? :?

It would be interesting just to see how it would work. I always thought it would a practical thing to build into a guitar amplifier.

This will get you started:

http://www.myplace.nu/avr/gtuner/

regards, Jack

It would be a fun DIY project.
And it sounds like it would turn out good looking.

I've got this tuner pedal from ashton, it works great if you really need a tuner...ive been thingking of pulling it apart, I could probably replace the LEDS and stick the pcb into a 1U rack, mount it with my amps, or combine it with an external power supply or smth.

I'm still keen on a schematic/project. It still sounds financially worth it if you have a spare 1U rack

http://www.oldcrows.net/~patchell/StrobeTuner/StrobeTunerWebpage.html

http://www.mts.net/~smythe/st-11.htm

http://www.geocities.com/eddiechoir/strobe.html

well it's not diy but if you're just looking for a way to tune w/o buying a tuner there are free apps that turn your laptop into a tuner. i use one called 'perfect pitch' that's very handy, it calculates Hz as well as semitone. i highly recommend it to any mac osx users out there.

http://los.dtcurrie.net/projects/

[quote author="AMZ-FX"]This will get you started:

http://www.myplace.nu/avr/gtuner/

regards, Jack[/quote]


yep this project looks fairly simple although it does involve programming a chip. The drawback is that it doesnt show you how far away you are (1 led) so a korg rack tuner still looks better.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v411/Nasse/TFORK2.jpg

This is my lousy re-draw from very old Finnish electronics mag, the pic was later collected to a book that I bought some day back at 70´s

It is TTL logig based "walking led" circuit, led light pattern moves from left to right or up-down or opposite depending of frequencies fed in

Not shown are how the reference freq and instrument freq are constructed (the author suggested 4 Mhz crystal and electronic organ top octave divider for reference, and filtering and scmitt trigger for the other)

I never built it (you can buy cheap tuners and learned to set up my guitar so I don´t need to tune so much) but once took few hours tinkering how and if it could work. I believe it could work, maybe

I have old Elektor schems somewhere, that uses centre point moving coil meter as display device

I made a guitar tuner about 6 years ago - I found it the other day in a box of junk.........

I'll try and post a pic if I can. I have no documentation and remember next to nothing about it. IIRC it uses a 555 timer, LF351, ring of 8 L.E.Ds, a small speaker and trim-pots for frequency tuning. Lights rotate in one direction if flat, other if sharp. Its crude!

You actually had to 'tune' the tuner before it worked!! I added more notes to the design - I gave it 12 so that it was "easier" to tune to open tunings etc etc.

It never worked that well and was a bitch to tune up to the correct freqs - not a good thing unless you had perfect pitch or a scope!!!

I found it in an old electronics magazine. There must be some worthwhile ones somewhere online....

Cheers Tom

doing some basic searches i came up with this:

http://lims.mech.northwestern.edu/~design/mechatronics/2001/Team15/

Looks like it has a motor to tune the guitar knobs by itsself!

[quote author="Smoke"]doing some basic searches i came up with this:

http://lims.mech.northwestern.edu/~design/mechatronics/2001/Team15/

Looks like it has a motor to tune the guitar knobs by itsself![/quote]

Can it always tune up from below the note?

> Can it always tune up from below the note?

Read that whole site. This is an Engineering Project, NOT a useful tool. The students solved enough engineering problems to get a grade, but it isn't useful yet. It has poor range, poor resolution, poor noise rejection, chokes on pluck-noise, and moving the motor from one peg to the next is utterly impractical. Fine details like "always tune up" are not handled.

Anyway.....

Are we musicians or technicians?

Actually, I am a technician with no musical chops. But I can tune a dead-beat by ear. And if you have a pitch reference (fork or dialtone) that's all you need to tune a simple fretted instrument like a guitar. And making two notes harmonious is the basic skill of melody/harmony musicians. And one of the few things that separates people from "dumb" animals.

And if you have a pitch reference (fork or dialtone) that's all you need to tune a simple fretted instrument like a guitar. And making two notes harmonious is the basic skill of melody/harmony musicians.

Click to expand...

I'm absolutely with you on this, but there are situations where you can't do this by ear.

Think to a live situation, to me it's neither serious nor professional to let all the audience hear you in the attempt of tuning your guitar by ear with all the noise that a live situation has.

Also crunch guitar is very sensible to little differences in tuning from string to string so you may have to correct tuning many times during a gig and this must be done quickly and precisely. This is where a tuner comes in hand..

Frank

I know people that can tune by ear. The problem they can have is they are on stage and need to mute the guitar and cheak the tuning if it goes out when playing, you know the vibrato bar (I dislike it being called a trem) use causing the string to stick someplace like the nut.

Some people like the rack mount tuner that has a big arc of leds.

FWIW I was looking at the Conn schematic from one of the posts. Hard Drive disk motors might be usefull to spin the disk. The logic might be able to fit in a microcontroller like a PIC . I can't read the IC numbers on the ST-11 schematic but it might be fun to build the page has a disk image that one might be able to print and use.

http://www.actiontuners.com/

I personally would not buy a thing like this

I have a Conn strobe, and the only complaint I have about it is the variable reference oscillator drifting. Maybe one day I'll make a phase lock loop for a stable, true 440Hz reference.

I built a solid state strobe tuner using a top octave divider chip and some LEDs; the circuit was from some magazine some years ago. It worked fine, but I found it more useful as a frequency reference for calibrating other tuning meters. If anyone is interested I'll see if I can find and scan the article.

Have You ever tried to use a tuningfork or such on stage while the other musicians in the band were playing? if You did I can assure You that You would at least look like a "dumb" animal...