Gear Tips & Advice: Buying a gig-friendly tuner

Start in tune and you're on the right path - but which tuner to buy? Here are some of your best options if you want one to gig with. A guitar tuner that can still serve you well in noisy rooms and low light conditions.

The highest quality pedal tuner in our opinion is the Peterson Strobostomp II (£179) for its blend of accuracy and ability to deal with 'sweetened' tunings should you so desire. It is rather pricey, however.

The industry standard floor tuner is the BOSS compact model. The latest iteration is the TU-3 (£85), which has a sensible range of features, display modes and so on, and suits the vast majority of tunings. As it's a BOSS compact design, it's robust too, one more reason why you see them on pedalboards everywhere.

A newer entry to the market is the Korg PitchBlack (£81), again with a good range of features similar to the TU-3, with the addition of true-bypass.

And we couldn't forget the brilliant TC Electronic PolyTune(£88), which in addition to high accuracy, true-bypass switching and a neat design, also enables you to check all six strings tuning with one single strum.