Review: Tune It

Published by Steve Litchfield at 7:44 UTC, February 3rd 2012

Summary:

Guitar playing and fiddling with tech seem to go hand in hand, judging from the number of fellow strummers I've come across. Many worse than me and a greater number a lot better. But we all have to tune our guitars every time we get the 'ol six string (or in my case the 12-string) out - which is why there's a booming cottage industry on every mobile platform in guitar tuning aids of every type. Here's a free option for Symbian....

I should say up front that Tune It is nowhere as ambitious as the commercial Tunerific, which I reviewed back in 2011. Rather than try and sample a guitar's audio output and produce interactive animations to show the pitch, Tune It goes altogether more old school, simply producing reference tones that you then use to tune your guitar by ear.

But don't switch off, thinking that the application is too trivial to be bothered with. For starters, Tune It is free (and no ads in sight), so you've got nothing whatsoever to lose by installing it and keeping it in a corner of your smartphone.

Secondly, and going a little philosophical, there's a distinct benefit to staying 'old school' and low-tech, in that the commercial sampling tuners reduce tuning each string to tweaking the tuning pegs and watching the fancy animations - you essentially stop fiddling when the display says so and never mind how the string sounds. Ultimately, as a player, you want to improve, but you also want to improve your musical ear, I'm often appalled by the numbed of players who carry on strumming something which is obviously out of tune because they just can't 'hear it'.

I should emphasise that I haven't got 'perfect pitch', but I can recognise when a note's not 'right'. In part this is because I've usually tuned my guitar by ear, playing a tuning fork to get a reference tone and then tuning by harmonics across the strings, or by playing the appropriate notes on a nearby electronic piano or organ and tuning to those.

Or, as here, by using a tool which can generate each of the string notes directly. The idea then is to train your ear to hear the differences between two plucked string tones and know not only which one is higher pitched (not that easy, especially when the difference is small) but how far the guitar string is 'out'. You'll end up being able to tune guitars quicker and quicker by ear and will feel a whole lot more musical than if you'd relied on pure electronic sampling tools.

 

  

 

In addition, every guitar has its own little, miniscule idiosyncrasies, i.e. no instrument is perfectly intoned. By tuning by ear, you'll eventually be able to make these little allowances as you go.

That's the theory then of why tuning using a simple app like Tune It can be 'better' then sampling utilities - but it does rely on you having a good musical ear and I accept it's not for everyone. Tune It does its best to help by producing genuine string tones, complete with harmonics and decay, rather than just 'pure' tones (as if from a 1980s keyboard). So you're not having to compare something weedy and pure with a live, messy, complicated, real world string. You effectively compare like with like, making the job much easier.

In terms of interface, you have to step through strings one at a time - each screen tap 'plucks' the string, as needed, then you move onto the next string with 'Next' and so on. This system does have the advantage that you don't have to tap accurately - after all, you've got a guitar in your hands, too, the phone is probably next to you on a table, so it's nice to just be able to tap anywhere on the virtual fretboard to hear the string sound again.

Three different tunings are supported, though in 20-odd years of playing I've never used anything other than 'standard' - I guess I'm not good, or experimental, enough! A nice tutorial walkthrough is also provided, albeit being slightly unnecessary for such a simple application and interface.

Obviously Tunerific is the most accomplished of the two applications, having both the sampling and string-sound functions, but if you just want something fast, free and effective then Tune It comes recommended. And will do its best to stop your tuning ears getting lazy!

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 3 Feb 2012

 

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