Hey, I remember making one of these as a high school electronics project! I wonder if I still have it in a box somewhere. It had an array of dip-switches with carefully chosen resistor values instead of a microcontroller-driven 7-segment display, though. And you couldn’t strum with it.

All you really need to keep tuned is the top string, which being the thickest almost never goes out of tune. The rest you just play the 5th fret and check if the string below is vibrating due to resonate frequencies, except for the second last where it’s the 4th fret. I find it much easier to tune with my eyes then my ears.

For people new to the guitar there’s an even easier way of tuning, if you own a Mac that is.

Apple’s Garage Band has a tuner, you just plug the amp into the Mac’s AUX jack. Apple packages some great guitar lessons in Garage Band too, pretty nice if you are just starting out learning.

haha yea planet waves has been making them for a while, that and they aren’t that great tuners

stroboscope approach is interesting but amp and piezo would be easier to use

@FrankO

As I am a studio musician by profession, your wrong.
Its like a woodworker who can cut a piece of wood without putting marks on it. The marks(tuner) help but they are not necessary and add an extra step which means time wasted, which means money wasted.

Basically if your in a studio i think you should be able to tune near perfect by ear.

@FrankO

Most cheap tuners (in the $20 range) are not accurate enough and result in a disater when you need perfect pitch (metal distortion anyone ?). Maybe the stroboscope is a good way to have very high accuracy for a cheap price (I’d use a $0.50 low-end PIC plus a good crystal just to blink two LEDs).

Integrating the tuner in a pick is a good idea anyway.

@Jeff Wallin perfect pitch can not be learned, its a genetic ability. but relative pitch can be learned. Relative pitch will never be as good as perfect pitch
Also your wrong. You would never EVER tune by ear in the studio (unless your producer just really didnt care about the project)
I really doubt you can tune a guitar or bass perfectly dead on. Especially not in an alternate tuning.
Besides any studio (unless your just in a really crappy one) is going to have a really nice calibrated tuner ready to go.

ha-ha-ha. That’s so nice thing!

wow! i used to do something similar. pick the harmonics for two strings and feel the vibrations in the neck, when they were tuned together the vibration would be constant. its kind of fun to tune my bass without hearing it! though, i did have to get some audio feedback for the first string obviously.

also if any one is interested in improving their Relitive pitch go to here:
http://www.good-ear.com/

if you do the exercises there for about 10-15 mins a day, you will notice a huge improvement in pitch and interval recognition.

Hi!

The AVR microcontroller for this project was chosen because we they’re cheap and we do use them a lot at our hackerspace.

I revised the PCB a bit to use a more commonly available 7Seg and used a standard 2xAA battery connector with the board being the same size as the battery holder and glued them together. Works great! Thanks for the project :)