I just went out and bought a Arion UM-70 Chromatic Auto Tuner with Metronome and I am a bit confused with some of the settings.
I am used to using my old martin stinger guitar tuner I bought 15 years ago with my guitar. It has a mechanical needle iinstead of digital.
Anyway...the Arion can be set to tune in the following keys: C, F, Bb, and Eb and here lies the confusion! I am guessing that "C" is the right key for NORMAL playing? Plus I can set each key to be # (sharp) or b (flat). What do I set this at as well I know the pitch should be 440Hz.
As you can tell from the photo the tuner also comes with a small pickup for acoustics. Do I clip this to the soundhole and where abouts on the soundhole if that's the case?
It kills me, I have always been quite savy with technology building my own computers and playing will all sorts of gadgets. But this simple little tuner has me stumped!! However, I did mainly buy it for the metronome feature and that's fairly easy to figure out!
Thanks
First of all, try reading the instruction manual, it can probably help you more than anyone here.
When tuning iit, I have no idea about the key of C thing but, don't touch the sharp/flat button. Then you might be tuning to Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb
instead of EADGBE.
Second, for tuning acoustics, you put the mic on the sound hole, on any part of the circle, as long as its under the strings.
Hope that helped
The guitar is a C instrument. All this means is that playing a C is really a C. Compare this to a B-flat trumpet, where playing a "C" as written on the musical staff really results in a "B-flat." So use C for tuning.
I would bet the clip-on mic works if you clip it to the headstock. Try this and let us know. (IMNSHO, if it needs to be clipped to the sound hole, it's a rather poor design.)
-=tension & release=-
blackzerogsh, no offense but reading the manual was the FIRST thing I did...and it's not much of a manual anyway...that's why I asked here.
gnease, thanks for the explation about the guitar being a "C" instrument. I did not know that. I wasn't sure if the other "keys" were like Drop tuning and that stuff.
The tuner also has a mic built in as well as the pickup but I heard its better to use a pickup when tuning to help eliminate any background noise....like plugging in an electric guitar to a tuner...
Thanks for the help!
Greg's dead on with the C instrument explanation.
A saxophone player learns that pressing three specific keys with the left hand, and four others with the right hand, equals note 'C' on the page. Releasing the fourth finger of the right hand gets you to 'D', and so on. The note that's actually produced won't be C... it'll most likely be Bb or Eb. BUT, when a sax player sees "C" on the page, he'll finger it exactly the same way, whether he's playing alto sax (and producing Eb) or tenor sax (producing Bb). It lets them switch instruments without re-learning the fingerings.
Guitars tend to all be tuned the same - to EADGBE. A 4-string tenor is usually tuned to DGBE, so the 2nd fret 1st string is still a C.
The only exception is in 1/2 size guitars. These are often tuned to GCFBbDG, because the extremely short scale length makes the strings a bit slack in standard tuning. So you could think of a 1/2 size guitar as an Eb instrument - play a C note on the page, and Eb comes out.
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