Effects Bay

Hello all. Very excited to announce that Phil at Fat Tone Guitars has put together a exclusive coupon offer for EffectsBay.com readers! Fat Tone is giving out TC Electronic Polytune Chromatic Tuners for $87.00 (after coupon code BAYPOLY12). That’s $12 savings on the regular price of $99 and includes FREE shipping! Yes! This coupon is good through 11:59PM Friday night.

This is a great tuner that is getting some fantastic user reviews out there, and the price is definitely right!

Below is a review video of the Polytune by PremierGuitar

Click here to go to Fat Tone Guitars and take advantage of this deal!

Popularity: 3%

A couple of weeks ago I posted the Polytune Poly-Chromatic Tuner post, and there was a lot of accurate speculation that this was a TC Electronics pedal coming out. Well, it’s a definite now. Checking out Musician’s Friend, I see that they are taking pre-orders for the TC Electronic Polytune Chromatic tuner! And the cost… is $99.00!

Here is the official pedal description:

Polytune is a chromatic pedal from TC Electronic that uses patented polychromatic tuning technology to show guitar and bass players an innovative way to tune their instruments. With polychromatic tuning, strum your guitar or bass and the display shows the tuning simultaneously for all strings so you can easily find and fix the culprit. With the addition of strobe and needle modes, players will enjoy extremely accurate tuning as well as a true bypass circuit with this state-of-the-art chromatic tuner.

Here is a demo by ProGuitarShopDemos

As I said, you can pre-order this pedal for $99.00 at Musician’s Friend. Pedal will be available on 2/18/2010 and the pedal ships for FREE!

Remember, if you like reading about pedals and seeing videos reviews from others, please subscribe to the RSS feed and get notified via email when there are new postings!

Popularity: 6%

Today on Twitter I read a reply from @markgrundhoefer asking if I saw the tuner video by ProGuitarShopDemos. Normally, I don’t get too excited by tuner videos (unless they’re hilarious) but this one was pretty interesting. Apparently, ProGuitarShop received a prototype to demo, but the neglected to include the name of where it’s from. This tuner seems quite cool. It’s a polyphonic tuner so it can detect multiple pitches. Long story short, you can strum all six strings and it’ll show the string(s) that are out of tune. I was pretty impressed. Check this out!

UPDATE

Looks like this pedal is most likely a T.C. Electronics pedal. On their home page (in the flash screen 1/7) shows the pedal. I’m guess we’ll hear more about this very soon.

Remember, if you like reading about pedals and seeing videos reviews from others, please subscribe to the RSS feed and get notified via email when there are new postings!

Popularity: 11%

I’ve been using the Boss TU-2 tuner for years, and I’ve talked about this pedal many times, but I’ve been seeing a lot of people using the Korg PitchBlack tuner, so I wanted to take a closer look.  I’ve always been surprised why there aren’t  a lot of tuner pedals out there, but they are definitely a must have. I’ve messed with the racks and tuners running in loops, and these just don’t work or last like a pedal tuner on the floor, for me any way.

Here is the official pedal description:

The pitchblack Chromatic Pedal Tuner offers you high precision, advanced functionality, and sleek style to make it Korg’s most advanced guitar/bass stompbox-style tuner yet. The pitchblack tuner has a tough aluminum die-cast body that will endure hard use on the road or in the studio. The large LED meter and note name display with light-emitting surface is easy to read in any setting from daylight to stage light to no light. The extremely smooth eleven-segment LED meter allows accurate visual tuning from any angle. The Pitch Black has a red LED to indicate on/off status and a tuning range of E0 (20.60 Hz) to C8 (4,186 Hz) with adjustable calibration between 436-445Hz.

I also found probably one of the most entertaining demos on YouTube by StopAndSearch. I actually watched this twice before writing this post.. this guy cracks me up.

You can pick up the Korg PitchBlack Chromatic Tuner for $89.00 at Musician’s Friend.

Remember, if you like reading about these pedals and seeing videos reviews from others, please subscribe to the RSS feed and get notified via email when there are new postings!

Popularity: 4%

I picked up the Boss TU-2 Chromatic Stomp Box Tuner about 10 years ago. Prior to that, I owned a series of digital tuners that I would include with a various looper pedals to keep the tuning on the ground. I remember how much I appreciated the quality and effectiveness of the Boss Tu-2 tuner immediately.

It is incredibly easy to view under various types of stage lighting and conditions, and is versatile in the sense that you can use it as a kill switch or mute while switching guitars, etc. It can also be used a power supply to power up your other pedals via daisy chain power cable.

Here are the official features for this pedal from Boss.

• BOSS world-renowned TU-Series tuner accuracy in a convenient stompbox design
• Mute/Bypass select for silent tuning with a single stomp
• 11-point LED indicators and new “stream” meter display tuning discrepancy via speed and direction of LEDs (speed of LED movement gets slower as pitch becomes more accurate)
• 7-segment LED displays string and note names, easily visible on dark stages
• Seven easy tuning modes include Chromatic, Guitar Regular, Guitar Flat, Guitar Double Flat, Bass Regular, Bass Flat, Bass Double Flat
• Tuning mode setting and display style choice stored in memory
• Adjustable reference pitch from 438 to 445Hz
• 8-octave tuning range—the widest in its class
• Footswitchable Tuner Off mode preserves battery life by disabling LEDs

Now, if you’ve been following this blog, and you haven’t please do (you can follow me by subscribing to our RSS and receive updates via email or follow me on Twitter), you’ll remember a post a few days ago where I discuss buffered bypass. Many of the pedals today are true-bypass, and that is always listed as a ‘feature’ of the pedal, but if you’re signal has nothing but true-bypass, you could be experiencing some potential tone issues.

I’m still trying to put the pieces together and there is a lot of debate and discussion out there on the topic, but by having a completely true-bypass line, you’ll be converting your cables into capacitors, basically darkening your tone due to the length of the signal path. One way to correct this is by adding a couple of buffered bypass items in the chain to alter the impedance of the guitar signal.

I’m mentioning this because the Boss TU-2 has buffered input/output stages to achieve this. If you have many pedals and good cable length, you might want to try to add the pedal as the first thing or last thing depending cable lengths and number of pedals, etc. Some guys like to have a buffer at the front and the end of their line.

Bottom line, the Boss TU-2 Chromatic Stomp Box Pedal is a must-have for any guitarist pedal board out there. They’re built to last and just plain work.. forever. I’ve had mine for 10 years now and it works like the day I got it with countless stomps on it.

You can pick up the TU-2 at Musician’s Friend for $99.

Popularity: 4%