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| | Customer Reviews: | | | Average Customer Review: ( 158 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
143 of 147 found the following review helpful:
 Help for aTin Ear May 28, 2007
By Richard L. Steiner
I am not a musician, but I love "playing" the ukulele as a way to amuse myself and relax at the end of a long day. Unfortunately I have trouble tuning my instrument because I am not so blessed with a tin ear. I have trouble determining when I have my uke strings in tune. I can get close, but often an off pitch string sounds OK to me.
I really never heard of an electronic tuner before I discovered the Korg CA-40 as a recommended product based on my purchasing history on the [...]. The price tag on the thing was so cheap I thought I could buy one and gamble that it was a remedy for my problem tuning the ukulele.
The tuner arrived and I was amazed at how easy it was to use and how nice my ukulele sounded once it was tuned properly. The Korg CA-40 "listens" to a string and an easily read screen along with a series of lights tell me what note a given string is sounding. The device automatically shows if a string is sharp or flat so I know to tighten or loosen it on the way to the proper sound.
I read some reviews of the Korg CA-40 by real musicians and was quickly intimidated by jargon and comments I didn't understand. I thought the tuner might be something a genuine amateur would find overly complicated to use. Not so--actually the tuner is probably more useful to a novice with a dumb ear than to the pro with perfect pitch. This thing is a winner.
105 of 108 found the following review helpful:
really fine tuner Apr 06, 2008
By ResearchingMom
I'm a professional classical musician, play viola, and use this every day. I usually use it with the Korg CM-100 tuner clip, which makes it even faster and more accurate, faster and more accurate IMO than the KORG OT-12 which costs much more. I also find it more accurate than the CA-30. It can easily track one note per second, and if my pitch is very accurate so it doesn't have to hunt much, it can even zero in in half a second, so I can actually practice passages with it. Batteries last a LONG time. A truly excellent tuner.
46 of 48 found the following review helpful:
Very pleased with this tuner! May 21, 2007
By Chino
I just purchased one of these little tuners from Amazon last week. Though my guitar is low quality, (that's the next thing I'm going to buy) tuning it using only the meter mode of the tuner made it sound quite good, much better than my ear tuning. This thing is sensitive, accurate, and incredibly easy to use. What else do you want?
23 of 24 found the following review helpful:
Sensitive enough Jun 22, 2008
By I. OLeary
"IOL"
I have two autoharps to tune. That is 72 strings in all. Sometimes it is difficult to pick up the low strings with other tuners, but this one does the job just fine. Easy to read display, even for old eyes. Nice and light and easy to take with you. Battery lasts a long time.
20 of 21 found the following review helpful:
 Know Its Limitations Jul 11, 2010
By bibliobob
"bibliobob"
This is an excellent tuner. It's a fine choice for a band or orchestra instrument, where exact intonation is under the control of the performer. It is accurate, responsive (will lock onto staccato notes), can produce a user-selectable reference tone and can be calibrated in 1 Hz steps from A=410 to A=480.
The last-selected calibration and reference tone are remembered when the tuner is off, until the batteries are replaced. Unlike some tuners, the reference tone is a tone, not a buzz. A good optional clip-on microphone is available, but the built-in mic works fine unless there is a lot of ambient noise. Small enough to fit in most instrument cases and sits securely on a standard music stand.
A close look at the display will reveal the needle moves in 2-cent increments. That means, assuming the electronics are perfectly accurate, this tuner will show anything between +/- 1 cent off the target pitch as perfectly in tune. That's a trivial difference for most orchestral and band instruments, because the performer is continuously adjusting intonation by ear, over a much greater range than +/- 1 cent.
However, it's not ideal for any instrument where intonation is relatively fixed, such as a guitar, because many trained musicians can hear a difference in the .3 cent range. Bottom line, a chord played by a guitar tuned solely with this or any other low-cost electronic tuner will sound out-of-tune to many people. As your ear develops, it will sound worse.
You could fine-tune by ear once the instrument is rough-tuned with the tuner. Or, better, tune one string to match the tuner's reference tone (or a tuning fork), then tune the other strings to each other by ear.
Technicians and studio musicians who don't want to tune by ear often use a strobe tuner, such as those made by Peterson or Sonic Research (most other brands are ordinary tuners with a strobe display). These are more accurate than most musicians can hear, are expensive, and take a day or two to get used to.
Korg LCA-120 Focus Tune Chromatic Tuner with Large Backlit LCD performs almost as well as a strobe tuner for a lot less money. Its Focus Tune feature automatically switches the full display from +/- 50 cents to +/- 10 cents, so the display resolution becomes about .5 cents, 4-times better than the CA-40. Most musicians would be satisfied with that. It also has a larger display with back light, adds jacks for headphones and external power, and volume control for reference tone. It's bulkier, unstable on a music stand, and probably more likely to be damaged if dropped. So I prefer the CA-40 for orchestral instruments, LCA-120 for guitar, and a certified technician with a good ear for piano.
Another alternative is software: TB Strobe Tuner. It's as accurate and precise as a real strobe tuner, and probably easier to use, provided a computer with a mic is handy. It generates a serial number based on your computer configuration. When you buy a license, you send this number to the developer to bypass the program's annoying trial mode. If you subsequently need to make a hardware change, such as upgrading a hard drive, it will revert to trial mode until you send the new serial number to the developer - a minor inconvenience unless the developer decides to stop supporting it. A license is very inexpensive and covers up-to-3 computers.
See all 158 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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