How To Tune Your Acoustic Guitar Using Your Smartphone

Lately I have become a fan of smartphones. I don’t own one at the moment, I have a “regular” Nokia phone, but I plan that somewhere in the near future to buy a new phone, maybe an E-TEN glofiish X800, or an Asus P320, but not at this moment.

Now, where are the mobile phones connected to guitars?

I must admit, the idea of this post came to me after reading an article on GuitarNoize.com about Sonoma Wireworks FourTrack, when I suddenly remembered about my lovely and trusty Korg guitar tuner that I recently broke. Well, not completely since those green lights still show where I am relatively to the pitch, but the display is totally dead, black, crashed (one day I put the tuner first and the multi-effect second in my gig bag, on top of the display of the tuner. That was the day when my guitar tuner died! RIP!).

The lights are not enough since the tuner has the capability to tune the bass also, by pushing a button, so I don’t know anymore if the button for the bass has been pushed or not, or if the pitch was altered by 1, 2, 3 half steps (another button). However, I learned to know that if it doesn’t hear the B string, must be on the bass setting, thus I push that button again and I find my way around it.

If at home I can easily tune my acoustic guitar by ear (or using the guitar tuner from the TonePort interface), on stage with all the noise around I’d better have a tuner. So, I definitively must buy a new one.

And now, finally, the connections with the mobile phones. Damn, it took a long time to reach this point, isn’t it?

One of my friends downloaded on his smartphone one of those great little applications, a software guitar tuner. Man, it comes handy for those moments when you want to tune your acoustic guitar and don’t have a tuner around.

Just start the application, get the mobile closer to the guitar and just tune the guitar! Of course this can not be used for electric guitars on stage, because there is no cable connection, only the mic of the mobile phone, but hey, for tuning the acoustic guitar in a relatively quiet place, it does the trick!

There are many options out there, I found a few myself, like 4Pockets Guitar Tuner ($19.95 on Amazon), or HandDee GTuner ($15) for example. You can find more for yourself, if you think they come handy.

By the way, how do you tune your guitar? Do you have one of those small tuners, have a tuner on the guitar processor or by year?

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