Strobe tuner

Nowadays, strobe tuners or known as stroboscopic tuners has become an essential element of tuning your acoustic guitar because of its accuracy. Three types of tuners stood out from strobe tuner; mechanical rotating disk, rotate disk with LED display attached strobe tuner, and tuners that works with virtual display which commonly used with computers. The purpose of this strobe is to differentiate between musical note and the frequency. Any trivial difference shown from those two will trigger a motion in the strobe display. It detect the notes from TRS (tip, ring, sleeve) input jack or a microphone attached to the strobe tuner.

Peterson Tuners is the best known brand for strobe tuner since its foundation in 1968 due to its production parallel to decent technology. LED strobe tuners are very commonly produced by companies such Sonic Research and Planet Waves as they are much more affordable. "Strobe mode" can appears in some other LED-based tuners but the accuracy becomes lessen compare to other mode. This is because the technique used to set the frequency of the note is patterned with LEDs instead of using a needle tuner.

So how does a strobe tuner works?

For easier review, let's use mechanical strobe tuner as an example for knowing the usage of each of its components. This type of strobe tuner has LEDs all over which are powered by amplified audio; strobe at the same frequency rate as the input indication. Example below shown two different strings played and resulting in different frequency.

A note played on guitar, sixth string at fifth fret - 110 Hz frequency

A note played on guitar, first string at fifth fret - 440 Hz frequency

The LED lights will flash for 110 or 440 times per second according to example from above. There is a motor-driven transparent disc just in front of the lamps which act as a rotating disc with specified speed. The speed is determined by the frequency of a note being played. The spinning somehow appears to be motionless although it is actually rotating if the flash is exactly the same as the frequency on the disc. However, if the note does not match with tune the rotation will appear to be out of harmonization.

These strobe units can be standardized with several tunings for custom disposition, extended tuning, and Buzz Feiten tuning adjustment. They can read accurately from even the shortest sound and needle-type tuners and able to display the outcome of the tuning. The difference of strobe tuner with needle/LED display tuners is that it can detect a short "voice" such as a tone from the Caribbean steelpan whereas the other will not be able to perform such act. This goes same as the musical pins used for machines that produce music as the technician need to use man power to scrub off the extra metal from the pin for pleasing note.

Currently the most expensive strobe tuner on the market is the Peterson's "Strobe Center". The tuner comes with 12 mechanical strobe displays, each one of them acts as a note in chromatic range. Overall, it can be tuned for more complexes and difficult sound sources as it appears to be more acoustic picture needed for certain instrument's output.