A stubborn low E turned into a new tuner release: pick your input, watch the signal, and low strings finally read right.
I spent a couple of evenings on the tuner this week, and it turned into one of those jobs where the bug you find is not the bug you went looking for.
It started with my bass. The low E simply would not tune. The display went D# too high, then E too high, then F too low, round and round, never landing on anything. I was sure the microphone was too weak. It wasn't.
A small microphone cannot really move air at 41 Hz. What actually reaches it is the second harmonic at 82 Hz — and 82 Hz sits exactly between the D and G string targets. So the tuner was hearing the right note and comparing it against the wrong string. Nothing wrong with its ears, everything wrong with what it attributed them to.
What is in the new version
- You can pick the input. There is finally a selector for which microphone or audio interface the tuner listens to. It remembers your choice, and it tells you what it is actually listening on — so "System default" stops being a mystery.
- There is a signal meter. A live bar showing whether anything is arriving at all, with a marker for the level detection needs. If it does not move, the problem is your input, not your playing. It promptly caught my own microphone muted by a function key.
- Low strings fold back to their fundamental. When a reading sits exactly on the overtone of a low string and far from everything else, the tuner reports the fundamental instead. A bass low E finally reads 41 Hz on a laptop mic.
That last one took the most thinking. Harmonic folding sounds simple until you notice that in plenty of tunings one string's overtone is another string of the same tuning — the low D in DADGAD, open C, and the voice presets where every semitone is a target. I went through all 42 tunings in the catalogue and found 247 such collisions. So folding only fires when a reading is far from everything else; otherwise the direct match wins. Where octaves genuinely overlap, one frame of audio cannot tell them apart at all — that is what tapping a string chip to lock it is for.
The bass is in tune. Not a bad trade for two evenings.
Open the tuner →
The longer write-up: picking your input and tuning low strings →