Light Tuner

This ain't a new thingie, nor will it ever have a tremendous impact on how people live their lives; it's just a cool, tiny and very handy tool for the guitar, bass or banjo players. It has been developed with one goal in mind: to be able to provide safe, fast and reliable tuning for these stringed instruments in the most unfriendly conditions of loud surrounding noise, too much light and without the need to plug in or into anything supplementary.

Tuners have evolved pretty steadily in the last 20 years as their producers have turned to greater reliability and accuracy rather than changing something in a technology which had no need to be changed. Nevertheless, each kind of tuner had its pros and cons: the optical ones provided visual indications about tuning which were quite handy in loud environments but became kind of difficult to read in extreme powerful light conditions. The other tuners, less often to be seen, were the acoustical ones, providing the actual note of the string you had to tune - they cared nothing about the light but were efficient in silent places only.

Thus came to life a new tuning technology, meant to cover for all the imperfections of the former two and even offering more. As the active principle was the controlled strobe light, the "loud noise around the player" problem was instantly solved.

The "too much light - I can't see a damn thing"-problem was also solved because the whole system had the overall dimensions of a regular guitar pick, so anyone could easily cover it with the playing hand such as to provide a darker region inside which the emitted light was to be seen without efforts.

Finally, there was an end to having to plug your instrument in other devices, such as afore-mentioned electronic tuners, and you wouldn't have to think of power supplies for the tuner you'd usually insert in your pedal-effect chains. The operation of the StroboPick was as simple as plucking a string! All one needed to do was to press a button on the StroboPick, then pluck the string and tune up or down according to the way the two red and green lights indicated. As the string vibrated, the two LEDs in the StroboPick would make 2 luminous spots on it, but these were not aligned until the string had the correct pitch.

Once the correct tension in the string was reached and the two luminous signals were in line, it meant that the tune was right: one more press of the same button and the StroboPick switched for the next frequency and the process was to be repeated once more and so on until the instrument was tuned. As you can see, everything is as simple as it can possibly be, easy to use even for kids. The movie you can download here will let you see and understand better the way this little, but so handy, tuner works.

At a price of $35 the StroboPick comes in at a way more convenient price than god knows what sophisticated tuning devices and it's by far more portable, easy to use and more enduring than a tuner stompbox or rack equipment.

Photos by Strobotron.com