What's the most important thing to buy after your guitar in the Cyber Monday music deals? A guitar tuner. Every single time. Because if you're not in tune, you'll never sound good. But why just buy one guitar tuner? For playing at home you'll need a clip-on headstock tuner, and if you're playing shows and jamming with friends a tuner pedal is a must. Luckily, great examples of both have been reduced at Sweetwater right now.
The Boss TU-3 is an industry-standard chromatic guitar tuner pedal – it's the world's best-selling stage tuner, after all. Built like a tank, pros and guitar techs have been relying on it on tour for years. Now it's a generous $30 off for Cyber Monday at Sweetwater.
It can also supply power for up to seven other 9-volt pedals via daisy chaining.
As a tuner, the TU-3 excels. The LED meter has a high-brightness mode to cope with daylight visibility as well as dark stages, Accu-Pitch to let you know when tuning is complete, support for seven-string guitars and six-string bass, plus flat tuning for up to six semitones below standard pitch.
The Boss TU-3 also has a whole other use: it can supply power for up to seven other 9-volt pedals via daisy chaining.
The TC Electronic PolyTune headstock tuner is something I always keep close by. It's my favourite headstock tuner by far, because its large strobe-style LED display is just so easy to read and use when you need to get back in tune fast.
Sweetwater hasn't just reduced the PolyTune to $39 for Cyber Monday, it's also reduced its UniTune Clip headstock tuner down to an absolute bargain $29. Both are available in black and white colour options too.
The key difference between the UniTune and PolyTune Clip versions is the latter supports polyphonic tuning where you can strum all your strings at once and it will indicate which ones are out of tune.
To be honest, I still check my strings one at a time, so the cheaper chromatic UniTune would be fine for my needs, but consider whether you'll use it.
If you really want to go to town on your pedalboard, I've got just the tuner for you.; the Walrus Audio Canvas Tuner. A stunning 2.4" colour LCD screen with brightness adjustment that allows you to upload any photo or pic you like as a screensaver – yes, even your cat. I did it myself when I reviewed it!
The Canvas Tuner has a lot going for it in the looks department – and you can even change the screen orientation (rotating 90°, 180°, or 270°) to place it sideways or even upside down for the kind of physical flexibility few other tuner pedals can offer.
The downside is it's comparatively juice-hungry for your pedal power supply at 300mA. But in return you get some really cool features: needle and strobe modes, TrueAssist giving fast visual feedback so you can adjust faster, eight different screen colour options if you really want to coordinate your pedalboard. And there's a heap of tuning and bypass modes. It's impressive stuff – even more so with $29.80 off!
