In my quest, I found a Korg MT-1200 that seemed to do the trick,
but when I started to play with it, it fell quite short.
Last week however, I ran across a web site that was advertising a
small strobe tuner with programmable temperament. Looking further I
became more intrigued and subsequently bought one.
I just received
it yesterday and it's blowing me away!.
It has two pages of note
memory with 88 notes each. So I was able to program each memory page to
each of my necks, C6th and E9th respectively, to the exact temperament
according to Jeff Newman, down to +_ 0.2 cents.
Once I had both necks
programmed, It took me about five minutes to tune up both necks, pedals
and knees. Once I got the hang of it, I kept the wrench in my hand, I
could go through BOTH necks in less than a minute.
I dial up the note,
hit the string and steady out the rotating led strobe display and it's tuned
down to the knats whisker, or to whatever temperament you have programmed
In addition to that, I can dial in an offset which will shift the WHOLE temperament memory(both pages) up or down to compensate for some purest who wants it his(or her) way.
Say this leader dude comes to the gig with a
sick guitar, or keyboard, or heaven forbid, a b@nj@r, which he wants everyone
to tune to him, or maybe he's sick!!.
So he plays his set note, I look at
it with the tuner, turn the calibrate knob until the strobe stabilizes, and
Walla!, I have the offset in cents his set note is from my tuning. I then
dial in that offset into the tuner, and than I can retune my strings to
the strobe within a minute or so. I think that is awesome.
With that amount of note memory, you could program your Base, 6 string, fiddle, and even your b@nj@r.
The fact that it's as accurate and as precision as it is, kinda gives me a warm feeling that what I put in is what I will get out..
The other question is however, is WHO's tuning does one go with??.
Emmons has a tuning, Jeffran College uses another, and there are a ½ dozen
more.
How does go about figuring out what the exact Just Intonation
should be in order to both compensate for the imperfect interval inherent i
n the music AND what the pressure of pedals do to the strings physically???
Anyway, I happy now that I can feel secure that at least I can assure my instrument is putting out what I am telling it to.
Whadda think?
If you're interested at looking at this thing for yourself, you can dial it up at www.izzy.net
Now I have an extra Korg to get rid of.
You know what, now that I think about it, this might be more apropos at the technical post, I'll put one there too and b0b can adjust accordingly
Steel forever!.
sc
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shc @CarterD10 10+5
would I rather be sailing?