Accessible Talking Tuner for iPod Touch and other i devices

[kestrell]

HotPaw Talking Tuner
$0.99
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/talking-tuner/id421065079?mt=8

Kes: I bought a pre-owned iPod Touch a few months ago, and so far, this is the first app which has gotten me to use it on a regular basis. It is very simple to use--just opent he app and it goes--and does what it is designed to do, no more. The voice is clear, even with the hearing impairment in my left ear.

As far as I am concerned, this app alone justifies the cost of the iPod Touch. The one problem I have with it is that it seems to go back and forth on whether my high E string is too sharp or too flat by the smallest increment. I use a beginning guitar CD to tune the high E, but I am also learning how to tune the guitar to itself, so this isn't a big problem.

Description: A hands-off, sound-activated, talking musical instrument tuner. Talking Tuner uses built-in speech synthesis, so it does not require that VoiceOver be enabled.
With the Auto-Speak switch turned on, Talking Tuner will listen for a note to be played, and then, after waiting for the end of the sound (so as not to talk over it), will speak the note name, and how many cents sharp or flat the end of the note is estimated to be.

More information at AppleVis
http://www.applevis.com/apps/ios/music/talking-tuner

Comments

[kestrell]

I don't think I have heard of that method of tuning, please do post more details. I also have a pitch pipe, btw. I'm still not very good at distinguishing pitch, so I figure if I use all the methods, I can find one or two which work reliably for me. Well, I say I am not very good at distinguishing pitch, but I can often pick out a simple tune with which I am familiar and use that to locate any perceptibly out-of-tune strings, but that's relevant pitch.

[jesse_the_k]

Sigh. I went hunting for a good description, since I no longer have a guitar to hand. It seems that in the world of tuning software, the approach I recommended is strongly deprecated. Paul Guy's extensive article
http://www.guyguitars.com/eng/handbook/Tuning/tuning.html
provides an excellent background -- complete with some musical physics & engineering -- on the challenge of tuning in "equal temperament" when our ears (and strings) are so happy with "natural intervals." (Which is why the B string always sounds so crumpled.)

Here's the "ideal" method I copied from that article.

--- begin forward ---
MY FAVOURITE METHOD by Paul Guy

If you tune all the strings to the same reference string, you can avoid a small error on one string affecting all the others.

Tune the high E string to a reference: compare
5th fret E on the B string
9th fret E on the G string
14th fret E on the D string
7th fret E on the A string (one octave below)
5th fret harmonic on the low E string.

I then cross check (if I feel the need) as follows:

12th fret harmonic on low E / fretted 7th fret E on A string.
12th fret harmonic on A / fretted 7th fret A on D string.
12th fret harmonic on D / fretted 7th fret D on the G string.
12th fret harmonic on G / fretted 8th fret G on B string.
12th fret harmonic on B / fretted 7th fret B on high E.

This method has worked well for me - and for many of my customers - for many years. (It is also extremely effective at getting the best available results out of a poorly adjusted instrument.)

--- forward ends ---
Since I was tunerless, I'd find an A from a handy piano (or on good days, from my head). Tune it one way, then check it three other ways. But even when I could hear pitches pretty well, pitch pipes made me squirm. The tonal difference between a blown and plucked instrument prevented me from using it effectively.

[kestrell]

First, I should have written "relative pitch" instead of "relevant pitch"; I realized this mistake much later when I was lying half-asleep in bed, so it's good to know that my inner copy editor is one of the last mental imps to call it a day, sigh.

Thank you for the description and the link, I will try this out next time I am tuning. I agree about the pitch pipe: the timbre is so different that it is difficult to transfer the note to the guitar, but I can hear the similarity when the guitar is aleady mostly in tune. Still, not one of my three favorite ways to tune a guitar. There isn't anything like a piano in the house--do you think some sort of small electronic keyboard might do the trick? I expect anything cheap enough to be in the toy piano category I am thinking of would not be perfectly pitched either.