Electronic tuners

Are the little electronic clip on mini tuners any good? I am thinking about picking one up... Any recommendations?

Yep, they are very good. I like the Kala Model KC-02 and the FZONE FT-800. I prefer the Kala for ukulele because you can select C tuning, D tuning and Chromatic. It's fast to use in the uke settings and you can tune anything with the Chromatic setting. I tuned a hammered dulcimer with it a few days ago. When you reach the note you're tuning to the color changes from yellow to green make it easier to tune in low light conditions. I've got five of them and haven't paid for any of them yet.

Jude

Where do you get them without paying for them. With my budget, that would be a great price range.. hahhah..

Musicguymic's ebay store (he's MGM here on the forum). Everytime I buy a uke from him, he sends me a free one.

Jude

We keep a tuner in the gig bag of each of our (seven) ukuleles. In addition, we keep one handy in the cockpit and my harmonica gig bag, plus we have given away a handful of them to people we jam with regularly. (I'm a bit of a tuning Nazi and giving friends a tuner helps soothe away a bit of my tuning fascism.)

Brands we have are:
Pono P-5
FZone FT-800
Intelli INT-500
Eno ET-3000 (the one in the UU Store)

They all work great. My least favorite is the Eno, but that is only because it is somewhat larger than the others. We purchased them from a variety of places, paying between $17 and $28 (that was in Puerto Rico, and it was painful to pay that much).

If we ever get together to jam and you're a bit out of tune, i'll probably end up giving you one.

I have the FZone FT-800. It's about the best $16 you'll ever spend on your uke hobby.... I'm tempted to try one of MGM's Kala KC-02's. They sound cool!

There are many earlier threads about tuners, and many of them offer comparisons between brands. Use the search function to seek them out.

The one thing I dislike with the Kala, is sometimes mine powers-up in D tuning, and it takes a moment before I realize it.

SailQwest said:

We keep a tuner in the gig bag of each of our (seven) ukuleles. In addition, we keep one handy in the cockpit and my harmonica gig bag, plus we have given away a handful of them to people we jam with regularly. (I'm a bit of a tuning Nazi and giving friends a tuner helps soothe away a bit of my tuning fascism.)

Brands we have are:
Pono P-5
FZone FT-800
Intelli INT-500
Eno ET-3000 (the one in the UU Store)

They all work great. My least favorite is the Eno, but that is only because it is somewhat larger than the others. We purchased them from a variety of places, paying between $17 and $28 (that was in Puerto Rico, and it was painful to pay that much).

If we ever get together to jam and you're a bit out of tune, i'll probably end up giving you one.

Click to expand...

That gives me great incentive to hunt ya down and jam with ya then.. hahha.. I'm not ready to go public with mine yet tho. I have been a bass player so long, and only picked up the Uke on a whim, because I always wanted one. Only had it now for about a week. Not doing too bad if I say so myself though, although having to tune it every 10 minutes or so, hahha.. I bought two within a couple days apart. I first bought a cheap Kala student one, and loved playing with it so much, I decided to go more serios about it and a couple days later bought a solid Mohog Ohana. Glad I did, because my facination turned to love at that point. I LOVE the mohogony Uke, and it plays so nice. Within a day, got pretty good at IZ's Over The Rainbow on it. Now, just want to get me a tuner to keep it in tune. I tend to be a tune nerd too, and as much as I been banging on it, I tune it several times a day even if I don't have to, lol..

I was looking at one of those JoYo JT-11's that Ebay is flooded with right now from Hong Kong. Being electronic, not sure if there would be any difference between one, or the other. Those on ebay are selling for about $10 on the bay right now. I have spent over $500 on Ukulele's and a Banjo over the past week, and kinda numb right now in the wallet, so the $10 is looking good to me right now, but don't want to just throw money away if it isn't worth a toot. And the fact that I am considering a Banjo Uke in my near future as well. <smile>

Thanks for the input. Anybody know anything about those JoYo ones?

The Intelli INT-500 is amazingly useful. It can be as noisy as you want all around you and you can still tune properly.

I have a Stagg uke tuner that cost about £20 and I'm sorry to say, as much as I love my Stagg uke, the tuner is not very good. I have to fix it every five seconds by removing the battery and then putting it back in and re-doing the settings. Sometimes I wonder about the accuracy of its tuning as well.

More often than not I still end up using online uke tuners.

Sparky

I been using on line tuners for the past week, and I'm not so sure I trust them. It's not the on line tuner, but rather the computer. I think the accuracy of those has allot to do with the audio and speaker system you are listening to them with. I am disabled, thus use a laptop, and not so sure I trust the questionable audio of a laptop, and those little 1" speakers.

I have three different brands of clip on tuners, and they all work equally well. However, I really like the Kala for exactly the reasons listed above. I would like my next tuner to come free from MGM (with purchase of a new ukulele). Hell, let's all get one free from Mike.....everyone deserves a new uke!

We have a couple of the Kala KC-02's and an ENO ET-3000, and agree with what's been said about them. I do like the ENO a bit bettre as it seems to be abit more sensative than the Kala, and it has a mic option too. The Kala seems to have a hard time picking up the vibrations up at the higher end of the fretboard sometimes, but it can't be beat for a quick tune up.

Paul December said:

The one thing I dislike with the Kala, is sometimes mine powers-up in D tuning, and it takes a moment before I realize it.

Click to expand...

I'm not quite understanding this, Paul. Why does the tuner have settings for different tunings? Doesn't it just read out whatever note the string is tuned to? I tune my soprano to D tuning just reading the note called out by the tuner. What am I missing, here?

Now that I have begun to experiment with other tunings, would such an option be worthwhile for me to invest in? I could use another tuner, anyway.... Oh, no. ETAS!!

After years of having tried and ending up dissing digital tuners, I've finally found one that has been as good as my own ears at getting all the strings tuned all together. The one I just got is the Korg AW-2. This is equally tight with my guitars and my uke. Apparently there are different optimal spots for different instruments, but, for ukes and guitars, it clips onto the pegboard. I think it cost me around $40. Maybe a little less, but I can't quite remember at the moment. One of the nicest aspects of this tuner is its small size. I think it might be the smallest of the clip-on digital tuners.

I have two Intelli 900s. Great little tuners.

Sure they have their quirks. The buttons rattle a bit, the tuner sometimes displays another note instead of the one you KNOW you are tuning - but you just ignore that and tune until the needle hits centre.

I've tried half-a-dozen clip ons and they all have their senior moments, but most are pretty good. I've settled on the Intelli.

A few people frown on the use of an electronic tuner but, trust me, a pub is rarely quiet enough to allow accurate tuning by ear. By all means practice your tuning fork / ear tuning skills in your bedroom but in the real world of jams and gigs life is too short - and so is the attention span of an audience.

mailman said:

I'm not quite understanding this, Paul. Why does the tuner have settings for different tunings? Doesn't it just read out whatever note the string is tuned to? I tune my soprano to D tuning just reading the note called out by the tuner. What am I missing, here?

Now that I have begun to experiment with other tunings, would such an option be worthwhile for me to invest in? I could use another tuner, anyway.... Oh, no. ETAS!!

Click to expand...

The benefit if a tuner with preset tunings is that will identify the string you're trying to tune. For eexample, the Kala 02 tuner, when set to C tuning on a ukulele strung to GCEA tuning, will try to figure out which string you're playing. So if you pluck the G string, it will identify that you're trying to tune the fourth string. In fact, whatever note you play, it will try to identify the string (GCEA) that it thinks you're trying to tune. This just makes it simpler for people who know whether they have an ukulele tuned to C or D but don't know what note each string should be tuned to. The Kala 02 also has a chromatic tuning setting, which permits you to tune to any note and test your tuning up and down the fretboard.

This is a big help for me, too. I had an old tuner I got with my first guitar yeaaaaars ago, but served very well for all my instruments. It suddenly has gone missing on me, and I've turned my place inside-out trying to find it. (It just vanished and I have no clue what happened to it! Very odd.)

It looks like I'm due for a new tuner anyway, and you've all narrowed the selection down for me considerably!

I lost my old, good one too. But my mistake. When I sold my Ric bass, I forgot to take it out of the case. I called the guy I sold it to, to ask him if it was in there, and he just replied yeah it's here. I told him I left it in the case by mistake, but all he said was, "Cool. Love the Ric, and the tuner is just a nice bonus then...". Jerk.. hahhah.. I didn't push it, because he did pay well for that bass, so I guess a tuner wasn't so much to ask spending that much..

StereoJoker said:

This is a big help for me, too. I had an old tuner I got with my first guitar yeaaaaars ago, but served very well for all my instruments. It suddenly has gone missing on me, and I've turned my place inside-out trying to find it. (It just vanished and I have no clue what happened to it! Very odd.)

It looks like I'm due for a new tuner anyway, and you've all narrowed the selection down for me considerably!

Click to expand...

I have bought 2 cheap electronic tuners on ebay. A JOYO JT-11 and a FZone FT-800. Both cost about $5 + shipping. The Joyo JT-11 was the one I purchased first and its not stable at all, jumps all over the place. So I decided I needed something better and found a few good reviews for the FT-800 so purchased that one. Its a much better tuner than the JT-11 and is very stable. It syncs up well with the online (sound) tuner I downloaded. I would recommend the FT-800 if you are wondering what el cheapo tuner to pick up from ebay. It works great.