Sunburst, thank you for that explanation. and thank you Sunburst, I learned a ton of info in that reply that I did not know, and all of it will help. The Unitune looks pretty large especially compared to the micro tuner, but the Peterson tuner is really big.Īnother vote for unitune and or a polytune-they do not eat battery life like some snarks do either. I was not familiar with the Unitune and in doing a quick search ran across a thread comparing the Unitune and Peterson. They have come out with a version that mounts to the screw of you tuner to eliminate that issue. The one issue with the micro tuner is it will leave (at least on a really nice mandolin) about a nickel sized circle/ring from the rubber foot. I really like the size and ability to be out of the way and out of sight. I have been using the D'Addario micro tuner for the past couple of years. I thought they were reliable and accurate. I used Korg tuners for my mandolin and my daughters violin/fiddles. the worst part was it was not accurate from the get go. I did not like the size, shape and they seem very fragile where the arm and tuner connect. I bought a Snark tuner on a Black Friday sale and hated it. That tends to make the fundamental stronger and the harmonics weaker. Plucking the string near it's center (12th fret area) can help. Sorry for the redundant info.Īnother thing I forgot to mention. Looks like I didn't fully read Tom's post before starting to type. Maybe there are tuners that reject harmonics better than others, but that is not added precision necessarily. If we tune well within 3 cents, that's about the best we can do, so higher precision is esoteric anyway. The precision of the tuner doesn't really have much to do with the harmonics of the note. Moving the tuner and clipping it on somewhere else will sometimes help the situation, but usually damping the string and plucking it again will eventually get you the right note. After all, it can only display one note at a time and all harmonics are present in the note. For example, D is the 5th harmonic of G, so it is not unusual for the clip-on tuner to "hear" the D instead of the G. Although it hasn't dried yet I can see that it works fine and will be pretty sensitive.The 4th and 5th harmonics are pretty strong when we pluck a string, and often clip-on tuners will pick up one of them instead of the fundamental. I Dremeled out a bit of the case and epoxied it in. Fortunately I had a bigger piezo disk on hand (with leads pre-soldered). When I got my soldering iron near it the top coating disappeared like morning dew. The big brass disk that is the base was no problem. I decided to try to solder wires to it to replace the brushes. I used a Q tip in a Dremel tool with toothpaste and it did a perfect job of polishing it up without doing any damage. Mine was failing to work properly so I took it apart. The usual solution is a good wack on a hard surface. It's a well-known problem that the contacts on the piezo corrode and fail to make contact. They use two springs on the PCB to connect to it. So, Snark, Chapter II The Snarks have a little 10 mm piezo sensor glued to the back of the case. It's just that I'm not going to buy caseloads of CR2032 just to use 5% of their capacity. It simply exits where the battery cover was. The angle and position of the VMA321 is good enough that you don't even need to trim the Snark case. You can actually solder glob the VMA321 onto two points of the Snark PCB that nicely take the power. I happened to have a little Velleman VMA321 LiPo charger and a random Lipo. I've seen both 50% and 25% duty cycles and I have no ideas what makes it switch between the two. The backlight anode goes to BAT+ and the cathode is pulled through a 10 ohm to ground by the chip. I was original thinking of just attaching a triple AAA holder and feeding it 4.5 V instead of 3 V and seeing how it liked it. I tried replacing the tiny chip LED that feeds the backlight with a chip LED I got off a dollar store flashlight. The chip resides under a glop on the PCB. The LCD is fed on a standard "zebra" piece of rubber. No, it's LCD with a white backlight and a colored filter. Without thinking I presumed that this thing was LED. By the time you've used up 5% of the battery you're shading the display with your hand and squinting to see. You put in a fresh coin lithium battery (CR2032) and it looks nice. It's become the standard clip-on guitar tuner, the Snark (and its variant, the Super Snark).
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