Recently I had a major tuner crisis. My last Intellitouch PT-10 just stopped functioning. It wasn’t a battery problem. It just wouldn’t turn on at all. I used to have four of them a couple of months back but all of them self destructed or just plain disappeared. Technically, I still have one but the hinge that holds the tuner body away from the instrument is stripped and the body just falls onto the bridge or the head stock depending where it is placed. Intellitouch PT 10’s are important because as clip-on tuners go they do (did) the best job of reading the low A and E strings on a bass. I learned that through the bass player tribal network after years of trying to tune my low strings with other tuners, and oh there were many other tuners.
When I was hipped to the PT-10, my plan was to corner the market and I did a fairly good job of it. I bought them at Gryphon, Guitar Center, from three or four online retailers and any brick and mortar music store I could find. At first, I just would lose them…in volume. If I went to jam, gig, festival, tractor pull or demolition derby, I would leave one or two of these contraptions behind when I packed up after the show. This got to be an expensive proposition, so I needed to mend my ways and start keeping track of my tuners. This is the long version of how I ended up with four of these PT-10’s for a couple of seasons.
As the number of tuners I had dwindled from four to three to two and I was feeling exposed. I went back to my extensive supply chain network to buy some replacements and found that PT-10 was replaced by the “new and improved” PT-10c. These suckers even told you the time. It turns out that new PT-10c had a downside, and it was a significant downside for me, they were completely useless in reading the low bass strings. I bought three.
The tuner crisis I spoke of earlier was when the last PT-10 died. I had no way to tune my bass. I hadn’t used my tuning fork in years and had no idea where it was. Probably stolen. (If you buy that story, I have a couple of business opportunities you might like to invest in.)
My first inclination was to go back to the original 1st generation bluegrass bass players to determine what clip-on tuner they used, Cedric Rainwater, Cousin Jake, George Shuffler and those guys. It turns out that Wikipedia doesn’t have a lot of information on that. A little more research on this topic led me to a startling discovery. These legendary bass players didn’t need clip-on tuners because they were actual musicians (like their colleagues on other instruments) and had developed ears to hear when they were in tune even extending to when the entire band was in tune. Well, that actual musician ship has sailed for me. I need an electronic tuner. It’s true I can get a little closer now to being in the tune than I could a few years ago but the bottom line is a tuner is a necessity for me.
When my last PT-10 crashed. I rounded up every other tuner that Linda and I had scattered in our house. I found approximately 8 tuners of different types and flavors, most without batteries which I had scavenged to keep my PT-10’s going. The question remained could any of these help me tune my bass. It turns out only marginally. Those darned low strings are just too hard for these gizmos to read, kind of like reverse dog whistles, only nothing could hear them.
The situation was getting disparate. I had a recording session with one of my bands scheduled and no way to tune my bass. I could get thrown out of the session and maybe fired from the band (again). This time I turned to the dark web and went to a site called “Talk Bass”. This took me a couple of tries as the first couple of dark web searches brought me to fishing sites but after a couple of refined searches I found the correct site and searched tuners. Most of the search results were not helpful and less than kind as apparently there are some real musicians on the dark web and they don’t think very highly of bass players who can’t tune their bass without an electronic device. However my perseverance paid off and I discovered some information on a tuner from TC Electronics called Polytune. According to the dark web bass guys (they’re probably Russians), this tuner is the one every tin-eared bass player should have.
Being a sucker for Russian dark web marketing, I bought one. The price was $50 as opposed to $20 dollars for the PT-10, which could be an issue with my propensity for losing the darn things but so far it works great. There are many programmable functions on this tuner that I’ll probably never use, but excitedly for me there is a function to set it up specifically for bass. No problem reading the low E.
I survived the recording session and didn’t get fired again…yet but we will see once I leave this high tech wonder at the next Farmer’s Market I play. Did I mention, it can even heat your coffee.
