Google adds a guitar tuner to Search | Hacker News Reader

Google adds a guitar tuner to Search

engadget.com

125 pointsjonbaer159 comments

About 20 years ago I bought my first digital guitar tuner, a Korg, that is about the size of a deck of cards. It had a monochrome LCD screen that mimicked an analog dial with a needle that moved to indicate flat or sharp. Years passed. Guitar tuning apps became a thing. I downloaded a few over the years. Then the one (free) one I had started showing ads. Little by little, update by update, the ads became more annoying, until one day it forced me to watch a 30 second ad before tuning my guitar. The one thing that I enjoyed to get away from computers and their....bother.

That day I went out and bought 4...FOUR snark clip on tuners, and another Korg. I deleted that stupid app and have not looked back.

I don't want to go back to sucky software apps replacing fully functional, well-designed single-purpose devices. There's just too much pull to make them into g****mn ad platforms.

Google search also has a crappy metronome. It sucks. I use my analog metronome all the time.

F-droid shows at least a dozen different apps, none of them with ads. Even if the open source apps were not a perfect fit for your case, you could have taken 10% of the money you spent and made everyone's life better.

Clip-on tuners are just far superior. They use a piezo and are driven by vibration, which works in a noisy environment, like a stage. I probably would not have bought one if that crappy phone app had not pissed me off so much. Thanks crappy phone app!

I am not arguing that the analog/hardware version of a product is superior. I am arguing that, provided:

- you were satisfied with the software version of a solution;

- what drove you away from it was the ads,

You could have solved the ad issue by looking at OSS alternatives, to which you had plenty to choose from.

Saying that the HW version is better, when a (good version) SW was enough, smells of post-fact rationalization.

Users are understandably angry with ads. I have different points of views because I am at the same time (a) a user, (b) a marketer and (c) an ad platform

These is how each point of view is unable to be reconciled:

a) ads are annoying. But I will watch ads rather than pay a subscription any day of the week. I however will agree to a one time IAP because it doesn't litter my bank account history. People shouldn't be expected to keep an eye on more recurring payments than absolutely necessary unless they have a personal assistant. It's irresponsible to make them responsible for this

b) ads are great because of their ability to appear in searches made by customers who are looking for exactly what I am selling. Or rather, ads were great. Giants offloading billions on absurd ad spends made ad placement unaffordable to many sustainable businesses. Also, ads don't really work that well since Apple flipped the switch off on tracking. It would be great if ads worked and weren't abused by the extremely well-funded because they are a fantastic sales channel for medium and small sized businesses. But in their current form they are a scam or a marketing channel for the big monopolies (Amazon, etc)

c) ads aren't worth the money Google or anyone pay you for showing them on your app/website. I suspect apps keep trying to monetize via ads because they all want to be a "giant", and actually charging for content keeps you small and unattractive to capital

So my conclusion is that the only viable method of monetization is one-time IAPs or up-front software purchases and the only sustainable software project is one that aims to remain small. Everything else is smoke created by excessive capital that makes everyone's life more miserable.

For me, no app would take the place of a clip on tuner. I play bass, and mostly (pandemic aside) live. Dedicated hardware is the way to go, and with this I can even tune mid-song if needed.

I haven't tried F-Droid tuners, but F-Droid's metronomes were an utter disappointment. Though I haven't tried developing and uploading a better one myself, so...

Yeah, the Snark is good, I usually use that with my acoustic guitars. I also use a Polytune 3 which is the first thing in my signal chain for electric or bass.

I've never had good results with tuning apps on my phone. Usually because of background noise - which is where the Snark shines, working through vibration!

Second on the Snark because it uses vibrations. It'll tune an unplugged electric guitar.

I found that my Snarks kept getting eaten by the dog so downvotes for making a dog-friendly tuner. I now have a strobe clip-on tuner that does ‘sweetened’ tuning and that aside, it’s much easier to read and apparently does not taste good to the dog.

I used to have the tuner pedal early in the chain, but recently I've found it more useful as last pedal. That way I can troubleshoot my signal chain without the amp being on / audience hearing noises. Might not work for everyone.

I like my Snark, but I'm a bit troubled by the instructions saying not to leave it on any instrument with a polyurethane finish, which I think is most guitars. Not sure how much I should worry about that.

Funny, I have a similar tuner that is permanently attached to both poly and (significantly more fragile) nitro guitars, and never saw anything of the sort happen.

Also I thought poly was virtually indestructible, those guitars never age...

If you want something permanent, I can recommend a D'addario. They can attach to the tuner screw and won't be in conctact with the wood.

As a non-guitarist but one-time musician, why are guitar tuners needed? Other stringed instruments seem to not need them, and I never thought to ask.

(Obviously you might need an absolute reference if you don't have absolute pitch)

All string instruments need regular tuning, but with things like violin, more emphasis is put during lessons on being able to tune your instrument fully off of hearing a single reference pitch

Perhaps because it's a necessary orchestral skill. They play an A and everybody tunes their instruments to it, producing that awesome wash of sound you get before a concert. For the violin you tune the A string and tune the others by hearing the open fifths between them.

For a guitar it's easier because you have frets, so you can play the fretted note on one string that should have the same pitch as the next (open) string up, then you just need to compare two pitches that should be equal, rather than hear an interval. (I'm not a guitarist so I don't know if that's considered a good technique.)

Perhaps it's just not considered such an important skill in the small groups people typically play the guitar in.

It's usually not a good idea to tune a guitar as you described. Basically a guitar has to use "temperate tuning" because it has frets, so you can't be absolutely in tune everywhere, but you can minimize the error on each position. So if you tune string by string relying on fretting the last string, you will "carry" the error, and the resulting tuning will be wrong. It is good for a first pass, but you then want to check that some specific positions do sound good. Depending on what you are playing (for example if you rely more on some open chord position), you might even want to tune the open string to make those position sound especially good (at the expense of some less common one). That is commonly referred to as "sweetened tuning".

EDIT: I might have confused things indeed. If you fret, you should not carry the error. Usually, an practical way to tune two string is to play harmonics and listen to the "beats" between them. That will carry the error. Fretting should work, but in practice does not really because that suppose that your intonation is perfect (ie the fret are perfectly placed), which they usually are not, especially on acoustics with no easy way to set it up.

That's very interesting. The tuning for a violin is always (afaik) to make the open strings a perfect 3/2 fifth apart, but then of course you can play to whatever tuning you want. (If you have the skill to do that - I certainly don't!)

That makes tuning a guitar a much more complex thing in principle, with choices and trade-offs to be made, so maybe that's a better explanation for the prevalence of tuners.

I say "always" (for the violin), but that has problems itself. Eg. If you're playing with an equal temperament (eg piano) accompaniment your open G will not match it and there's no other way to play that note. Presumably advanced violinists have to choose their own tradeoffs, but I was always taught to hear the fifth and would always be aiming for a just fifth (tuning an equal tempered fifth by ear would be a neat trick!).

Edit: Hmmm, thinking about it the guitar should be easier to tune to equal temperament (if that's what you want) as presumably the frets are equal-temperament semitones apart. For that tuning, it's the violinist who's "carrying the error".

> presumably the frets are equal-temperament semitones apart

Guitars are made of wood, which bends (both the neck and the top) as one adjusts the tension of the strings. As the neck bends, the length of the string between the bridge and nut changes, and the height of the strings above the fingerboard varies in quite a complex way along the neck, changing the amount of tension added by pushing the string down to hold it against the fret. Similar changes in frequency occur as frets and fretboard wear down a little, increasing the distance needed to properly fret a string.

The neck and top will warp and bend with age, with changes in temperature and humidity. And after a guitar has been played a while, it will have been worked over by one or more guitar technicians. There are so many variables that nothing can be taken for granted. Using accurate electronic tuners is presumably the simplest and fastest way for guitarists to maintain respectable pitch in most musical presentations.

Guitars have a neck tension rod with an adjustment screw that changes the neck bow. They also have intonation adjustment screws that adjust the location of the tail bridge for each string individually. Then there's still tail bridge string height adjustment.

Neck adjustment needs to be done because seasonal moisture changes can change the bow of the neck. Depends on guitar. This is mostly for proper playing action, so strings don't buzz but aren't too high from the fret board either.

Intonation needs to be changed when you change some other things, like the things mentioned above or string gauge for example. There a tuner is very handy, you can compare the string fretted on the twelvth fret to its harmonic there. The differences are small and hard to hear.

Same things apply for electric basses.

Don't know how things are dealt with on a violin or cello, but the lack of frets certainly makes some of the adjustments unneeded.

With guitar, you only adjust these things when doing maintenance, not in the back room and certainly not on stage.

On the cello (and viola) three perfect 3:2 ("pythagorian") fifths down from the A string makes for a low C that's noticeably flat when compared to equal-tempered instruments. For string quartet playing, it's manageable, because the violins will adjust when necessary, but for piano-accompanied playing, cellists will raise the low C a little so it doesn't clash with the C's on the piano.

With violins - or other fretless instruments - isn't it also that they're a bit more forgiving if they're slightly out of tune? I did gather that violinists do the vibrato / wiggling on purpose because, it being fretless, they can't hit the exact note.

Piano tuning cost something like $100+.

You can do without, but it is useful, if you aren't that good at tuning by ear. My electro-acoustic guitar has a tuner built into it. I wouldn't call myself a musician, the precision of my hearing is dubious and since I practice rarely, I tend to use it each time.

Otherwise I'd spend 5 minutes each time trying to get it sound right and then redoing it after playing something, because I didn't get it fully right and I realise it once I play something I'm familiar with.

Because tuning by ear is difficult and playing the guitar can be fun even if you're not musically talented enough to tune the instrument.

Another issue is that guitars are often played in a amplified live setting. You want to be able to adjust your tuning while the rest of the band is playing or other noise is present, and you don't want the audience or others to hear you tuning (so you can't hear it yourself either).

I can tune my guitar relatively but I can not for the life of me tune it with from an external reference pitch like a piano key. I use a tuner if I need to be in tune with other instruments.

Yeah on stage, the 'playing in a very loud setting with all the band preparing' thing, or between tunes or (useful) to just cut my sound, avoid feedback or other stage shit. https://www.boss.info/us/products/tu-3/ is a Workhorse.

With guitar you are much more likely to have to re-tune during a performance. I can think of a couple of reasons.

Steel core strings (on guitar) have a much higher coefficient of thermal expansion than gut-core strings (on orchestra instruments). If you start a concert at dusk your guitar will go quite a bit sharp if you have a cool breeze blowing across the stage after the sun sets.

Some of the playing styles require large bends or use of a tremelo which is much more likely to throw some of your strings out during a performance. Having a pedal means you can quickly re-tune between songs without having to blast it over the PA.

Also at an orchestra it is expected that the crowd will be relatively quiet so that the musicians can hear their instruments while they are tuning. At a rock concert you will have a tough time hearing your instrument while tuning, and you don't necessarily want to subject the crowd to your tuning noise over the PA.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I should add - most other string instruments aren't fretted so the musician has the opportunity to correctly intonate a slightly off-pitch string. The frets on guitar means the strings have to be perfectly tuned unless you can bend them in (which isn't really a standard skill)

Actually gut strings are horribly unstable, but are virtually obsolete, having been supplanted by steel and synthetic cores. But orchestral musicians have learned to discreetly tune when they notice that their instrument has drifted out of tune. But like you say, being able to hear yourself helps. The same instruments in a quieter setting are often tuned by ear.

Orchestras tune up to the concert master, usually one of the violinists. So everyone gets to tune one of their strings to the pitch of the one string of the concert master. Almost all of the strings in an orchestra (excepting things like guitar, banjo, lute, sitar) have 4 strings (violin family), with the frequency intervals (ratio of frequencies) between adjacent strings being usually a perfect fifth, or perfect fourth (e.g. string bases) which is the inverse ratio to that of a perfect fifth.

So if I have a violin in my mitt, and I tune my A string to an A from the lead violinist, to put my instrument into tune, I must get the E string to be a perfect fifth above the A, the D string to be a perfect fifth below the A, and the G string to be a perfect fifth below the D. The perfect fifth relationship has the higher string vibrating three times for each two times the lower string vibrates, plus a tiny adjustment to get the frequency ratios of the twelve half-steps in an octave all equal. The adjustment is very small (about 0.11%), you could tune a violin with the fifths all exactly 3 to 2 so that, e.g., the google tuner could still show all four strings as in tune. And the 3 to 2 ratio is about the easiest interval less than an octave to do by ear. So most violinists, cellists, etc with good ears do fine without tuners.

The guitar has an interval of a major third between the G and B strings. The integer ratio of frequencies for this interval is usually given as 5 / 4, but the adjustment to even out the steps in the octave is larger, about 0.79%, and you cannot tune the other notes on a guitar at showtime by moving the frets around, so tuning the guitar (and other fretted instruments) is more like tuning a piano than tuning a violin or cello.

Have to say, there's something really satisfying about an orchestra tuning before a concert. If everyone's tuned in, everything starts to resonate together which is when you know they're in tune.

>, why are guitar tuners needed? Other stringed instruments seem to not need them,

I love how that innocent question reveals how a popular phrase for objects (i.e. "guitar tuner" instead of "violin tuner") alters public perception. It hides that fact that other stringed instruments like harps/violins do use outside aids (electronics, smartphone apps, or websites[1].)

Some observations:

- guitars are more common than violins, so the tuning object that's more common is ... the "guitar tuner"

- other stringed instrument musicians like harp and violin players also use so-called "guitar tuners" or metronomes that generates a reference pitch A440. Plenty of Youtube tutorials showing harpists/violinists how to use guitar tuners.

- formal vs informal cultural background of the instrument: the "orchestral" instruments like violin have a more formal structure (school ensembles) so you often end up in a situation where a student violinist has no idea how to tune their instrument because "my music teacher always did it for me". Likewise, piano players pay "piano tuners" to tune their instruments. On the other hand, guitars are more of a "folk" instrument (home playing, campfires, self-taught, etc) so guitar players have more a DIY attitude for tuning from the start.

[1] https://violinspiration.com/free-online-violin-tuner-with-mi...

I also heard that professional musicians - guitarists as well - can tune their instrument by ear.

Pianos need regular tuning too, done by experts - they change tone depending on weather, temperature and humidity as well, so they have to be in a stable environment if at all possible. But these people can mostly tune them by ear, or they will have a tune fork for the base tone (A I believe) and work from there.

Yeah 95% or more will need a tuning fork at a minimum to give a frame of reference. It is fairly common for strings accompanied by a piano to ask for a note from the piano to start from (G for violin say)

In the case of ensembles with a piano, I've heard it's because you can't retune the piano in the minutes before the performance. So it makes no sense for musicians to tune to a fork (or using an electric tuner) and leave the piano out of tune, so they all take the key tone from the piano

Tuning a guitar (or other stringed instrument) so that the strings are more or less in tune with each other is a really basic skill that even very amateur players can mostly do. Being able to tune to an absolute pitch without any kind of reference is kind of freakishly rare.

This. Use harmonics after getting the A from an external source.

Go to any place with a piano that is not used by professionals. Some places (here, at least) have public pianos, like train stations.

Press any of the keys and the same key on a different octave, together. For instance, Do and Do. Do you hear that slow oscillation of the sound going up and down? That is because the piano is not in perfect tune. If you were to try that on a concert piano before the show, the sound would be perfectly stable.

My (guitar, hohner) trem will still drop the strings off the fretboard, and can raise the tuning up about a 4th. Add lights in a show, over time..something might drift - or, in a jam (as in session) with no keyboards - the bass may drift out and you have to retune. Happy to say, my strings are >15 years old! Dinged and dented, and very bent (fretwear), i refuse to change them only on principle. After all that, i have a piezo tuner, my pedals have tuners, but i much prefer (in a live situation, especially) using a my ears over a machine - an 'on' snaredrum will soon get those beats beating.

You are dissing a product that you didn't pay money for, and comparing it unfavorably to one that you did. How is that fair.

There are metronome and tuner apps that are way more pleasant and functional than any hardware product, if you could shell out just a few bucks (< $10). You also have fewer batteries to manage.

> How is that fair.

They chose not to charge money for it. They chose to ruin it with annoying ads nobody wants to see. It is absolutely fair.

OP is dissing one app, but making a generalised comment on all software apps in the tuner/metronome category.

There is no shortage of well done apps that cost very little (most of them cheaper than the cheapest korg tuner) and packing in way more functionality. If OP's comment was something to the tune (heh) of "I tried a bunch of paid top-rated apps and I prefer my hardware tuner", I'd consider it a fair comparison.

I read it as dissing all free/crap/adware. Which is like dissing TV adverts or billboards or, I dunno, stickers on racing cars.

So, cough up for Netflix, or move to an area where people have expended effort to make sure billboards are not permitted, or, I dunno, go watch the ponies. It’s all out there, just got to pay one of the prices.

If you don’t want ads, you pay, or pick up one of dozens of perfectly serviceable used hardware tuners on eBay for 5 quid all day long.

I'm ok with ads. I just don't want to see them everywhere I look.

And no, "just" move to another place is not a proper argument:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo

You're right.

I didn't mean to say “move to an area where people have expended effort to make sure billboards are not permitted”.

I meant to say “expend effort to make sure billboards are not permitted, or move to an area where people have expended effort to make sure billboards are not permitted”.

> If you don’t want ads

You block them.

Except you can't. At least not easily, and that's just for now.

I guess I'm in the opposite camp. I have a drawer of clip-on tuners which broke or ran out of battery which is hard to change or just weren't easy to use or reliable. A sturdy boss tuner somewhere in my drawer of cables that's pain to pull out. And two apps that are on all my devices, easily always accessible at home or friend's, and can tune my guitar my bass and my kids ukulele. I wish I preferred the hardware unit, I do - but the convenience factor of the app is too high. I am not spammed with adware but I assume I paid for them at some point - I get value so I gave them money. My expectation of free apps are exactly what price would suggest. We have a choice between ad supported and paid product. Put your money where your mouth - or rather righteous blogs and comments are.

Edit: google "best tuner apps" and the two I use are consistently at the top. If those aren't in the top 30 of your appstore search, then we have a discoverablity problem, not a free or ad supported software problem. And again, if you picked random tuner from Amazon instead of going to store or reading reviews your experience might be the same. So - let's focus on what true issue / rage is, and compare apples to apples :)

> Which is like dissing TV adverts or billboards or, I dunno, stickers on racing cars.

Absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing any of that. Paying for TV channels yet being forced to see ads is an indignity. Billboards and all other forms of advertising are nothing but visual pollution, cities that have banned them are nicer. Stickers on racing cars are also visual pollution.

> There is no shortage of well done apps that cost very little (most of them cheaper than the cheapest korg tuner) and packing in way more functionality.

Name three.

The problem with app stores (both Google's and Apple's) is that it's impossible to find those good quality apps for commodity needs, in the sea of advertisement/IAP-backed garbage.

Right! 5 minutes per app to evaluate. And no assurance the "good" one won't change.

The free one from Fender is not terrible - but still behaves like crapware.

I can’t name three because the first one I bought is perfect for my needs on iOS. Guitar Tuna https://apps.apple.com/us/app/guitartuna-guitar-bass-tuner/i...

I don't think any app can compare favorably to a clipon tuner, if for no reason other than clip on tuners work in noisy rooms. Tuner apps are useful if you have no other options, but compared to a clip on or tuning pedal, no question what's better. You ever see a musician on stage using their phone to tune?

Sure, that's an excellent reason to prefer hardware.

Just searching for tuner apps, in the first 10 or so results there were no options for me without ads or without "upgrade to pro" or "subscribe to us" or "3 days trial".

The first three had an ad-free option around 10-15 dollars to unlock, which is fair but the price of a good hardware tuner that will certainly last WAY longer than any of those apps and will operate 10x better.

The first one without the subscription is the Boss tuner, which is free, but has spammy notifications for Boss advertisements.

The first one that isn't complete crap is in position 30 or so.

So yeah, I'm gonna diss something I didn't pay for, and I didn't even download. Simply because those products are better off not existing for me as a consumer, since they lead to confusion and redundancy and prevent me from finding truly quality things.

Answering the sibling post that is now dead:

Considering the option I went for is buying a proper product with proper warranty, operates 100x better and whose manufacturer spent WAY more R&D than all those shitty small apps, I fail to see how I am the entitled one.

Also, my current tuner is Polyphonic (TC Polytune). I bet a couple of the 30 or so apps I saw might be too, but how the fuck should I know? There's nothing in descriptions. I'd rather spent the time getting some proper device than cruising trough shitty products that want to show me ads.

Also, my Polytune doesn't charge me extra for tuning a Ukulele. Unlike some of the apps in the store.

The only "entitled" people here are those SaaSholes flooding the market with copycat shitty apps.

But think about the "exposure" you're getting by giving away your app for free.

(Musician joke)

One of the best purchases I ever made was about 8 years ago when I bought the Polytune iOS app for less than £5. It does one thing really well, has never tried to take more of my attention than it should with upgrades or ads, and every time I get a new phone it comes with me.

Sorry if this is well off topic, but what is the word you've censored in your penultimate paragraph?

> g**mn ad platforms

I can't for the life of me figure it out. At first I thought you meant "gaming" because of pointless "gamificiation" (no, I don't want to collect a gem and get virtual rewards for "streaks" every time I tune my guitar to encourage me to engage with your app every day) but that doesn't quite fit, nor does "Google"

I think its goddamn ;)

Maybe it's gee gosh golly darmn?

Ah well I feel a bit daft now, not sure how that didn't cross my mind

I can't understand why people self-censor them; I mean you didn't figure out goddamn, but it's insulting to believe people can't parse what f*k or s*t refers to.

Swearing is allowed on here, you won't get banned. And we're all adults here, we won't be shocked or offended by bad language.

Alternatively, don't swear at all, there's plenty of other ways to express yourself. But don't do this shitty middle-ground bleeping things out bit, we're not stupid.

My favourite kind of useless censorship is things like "st*pid cunt"

It's the mark of a progressive Australian!

If you stick to apps from F-Droid you can avoid this in my experience. I don't think any apps I have contain ads. Not sure if F-Droid actually bans them, or if it's the quality that comes with being free (as in freedom) software.

To add to that, I suppose I'm far from an expert, but I'd suggest that it's worthwhile for any musician to learn how to use a tuning fork.

Maybe not to start with, and those Snark tuners certainly are indispensable if you need to tune your instrument in a noisy environment. And perhaps I'm just showing my age here. (We didn't have digital tuners when I was a kid, or at least I could never afford one.) But I would guess that learning how to tune your instrument the analog way is a useful step in developing your musical ear.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm getting tired of having everything good replaced by a mediocre version that offers debatable convenience. A meh guitar tuner, a phone tree that usually understands my spoken choices, the opportunity to enter my claim information online and be questioned by an impersonal overseas operator later instead of just talking with my agent — none of these are developments that improve my life, though they do a lot to help the companies that want my business.

P.S. Get off my lawn.

That's disruption, in the sense intended by Clayton M. Christensen.

Walmart was never going to provide a better service than Whole Foods (or some equivalent-to-WF store that predates Walmart, since I'm sure there are some). But it might provide a service that's 80% as good, at 20% of the price. And if it does, you might buy it.

Are you under the impression that it's no longer possible to install a dedicated guitar-tuning Android app, or indeed that it's no longer possible to buy a dedicated guitar tuner?

OK but, is Google really trying to disrupt the guitar tuner market?

This isn't them trying to disrupt an incumbent. It's a neat hack from a company with more money than they know what to do with.

It's most likely from Google's dev time program where a dev gets to work on a pet project 20%(?) of their time. That's why a ton of new projects come out of google but get canned in a few years.

Does that still exist as a policy?

The policy still exists. The practice is dying out, however.

I don't understand. People would rather spend a day per week working on google's stuff than their own project?

Working on your own projects won't get you promoted I would guess.

Unless that project is a messaging app.

Projects aren't typically scheduled to account for it in my experience. If I took that much time to work on something that's not an OKR then I'd just be falling behind.

So you totally can work on your own project for 20% of your time but you won't get 20% of your time to work on your project. Right.

So the policy is dead with only a dishonest echo remaining..? Doesn't even qualify as evil anymore on google's standards, but when google hired freelance recruiters were ringing me several times a week it really would have. Those were the days, we used to think microsoft were horrible. And they were!

The top result on the Play store for "Guitar Tuner" is GuitarTuna, which is around 200 MB in size if memory serves me well. The second result's reviews indicate that it's full of extremely disruptive ads.

So whatever Google is trying to do, for me it has disrupted that "market" by providing an easy-to-find, clean alternative.

I've been using Guitar Tuna for years. It's extremely effective and I don't really notice the ads.

No, but they want permission to use your microphone.

If you look for a tuner app in the Android app store, there are like thousands of choices. Most of them are adware, or they don't register my double bass very well. I would have no idea where to begin looking for an app that is better in some way, or that even works. That market has pretty much disrupted itself.

Fortunately I learned to tune by ear, so a tuner app is really a first world problem.

With on-line music sessions now spanning the globe, and only a small minority of people able to achieve perfect absolute pitch, standard pitch is the lingua franca of internet music, and should be widely useful.

What is standard pitch?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440_(pitch_standard)

Most people that tune by ear tune relatively, e.g. they tune each string to another string. If there's no standard reference then it'll sound fine but you can't play with anyone else who is tuned to the standard... Though many people can tune to a reference pitch as well without using a tuner.

Oh yeah, my chromatic tuner is set to 440 hz. My guitar stays in pretty good tune to my ears at least but I would retune it with the tuner if playing with other instruments for sure or if it were to get out of tune (never seems to). When I change strings I do check my intonation too. Pretty easy to set on stratocasters. I think a lot of guitars especially are not set up well and intonation is probably off even if the open strings are in tune.

fun fact: it's impossible to get perfect intonation across the scale length on your standard fretboard guitar (like a Strat). The intonation adjustments (like checking the 12th fret) are a compromise. Of course, that's better than just having it wrong all over ;) A lot of people (myself included) just don't notice these small "errors" and sometimes it actually makes for a better sound...

Indeed, likewise on all wind instruments. Perfect tuning is a niche feature in music.

Guitar Tuna is an excellent app with minimal distractions, simple and intuitive ui, and lets you calibrate, which can be invaluable. Tunes down to A1 with excellent bass presets. There are ads in the free version, and removing them / unlocking extras costs $12.99 .

Best way to filter apps I've found is to look for three things: domain appropriate pricing, high numbers of good (believable) reviews, and a lifetime greater than 12 months.

Very few crapware apps have all three at once - it also helps to ask relevant communities on enthusiast forums when it comes to craft - I've found great bubble level recommendations from a woodworking forum. Going to Twitter or social media comes in third, it's tough to get a good signal noise ratio from the hordes.

Eventually ai might be able to curate for quality, but having multiple social proxies can help in the meantime.

So maybe if google curated their store a bit, you wouldn't have that problem!

This is merely a result of the democratization of basic services- now everybody can receive the same level of mediocrity.

Like Andy Warhol put it:

> What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

And then Coke begat New Coke which begat “Old” Coke which was actually a new drink based on corn syrup instead of cane sugar and then people started importing cane sugar Coke from Mexico because they don’t have insane corn subsidies that make corn syrup stupid cheap compared to sugar and now, yeah, there is a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

Unless he, too, chose to spend like a buck thirty for a 12oz bottle of the Good Stuff at a store that has it instead of two bucks for a 20oz bottle of the corn syrup.

I imagine this is just some Google engineer's 20% project, and that they are really enthusiastic about guitars.

Also I can see this being useful in many cases, in case my battery was flat and I had to borrow someone's phone to tune up. I don't think that musicians will stop buying tuner apps because Google has one, a good tuner app is indispensable.

They may also get some interesting data about microphone distortions across devices and browsers.

I look forward to receiving personalized ads for books on how to improve my intonation. ;-)

I don’t think there’s anything about it that’s specific to guitars.

Most musicians probably are using a clip on or chromatic tuner rather than their phone to be fair

Where I work is all in on Google cloud and the "meh but convenient" factor of GCP services is starting to really grate on me. "X 3rd party service has great reviews and is cheaper" suddenly becomes contestable and a debate because we'd have to deal with a bit of additional complexity and pay for data transfer out of GCP.

That’s the problem with tech giants. They tie you into a mediocre environment that makes it easy to use mediocre products . My company is using MS Teams because it comes with Office. But when you start to use it you quickly realize how bad it is.

We would be much better off if we had more small tech companies instead of giants like Apple, MS and Google.

I'm guessing you're looking at something like B2? Doing multi-cloud like that really is a hassle.

> meh

I agree. The in-tune reading is about plus/minus 5 cents (1 cent = 0.01 half steps). It is not nearly as precise or even as quick to determine the pitch as wtuner or lingot or the $14 D'addario clip-on tuner or even the korg vocal pitch trainer.

But who doesn't own one of those if they care?

The last time I used a crummy app based guitar tuner was on a guitar at a friend's house that was basically a prop and no one played (so no tuner, also thank you Brian may for using a coin as a pick).

A tuner built by people who are not you for people who are not you is not on your lawn.

Workaround: You can force most of those phone trees into a failsafe button pressing mode by pressing 0 until it gives up on voice. You shouldn't have to play the system to make it work reasonably, but...

Clicking this thread I thought "at least this is something HN can't bash Google for" but of course I was wrong. You guys are really creative in your hate.

Google has a long history of:

- getting into fields to offer a free product then discontinuing it

- integrating random apps and services into its search and blocking more that half of search results pages with its own content.

This seems to come straight into the second category.

I mean, according to the article it was its own property on the side, living its life. You could eventually summon from the assistant if you wanted to, but they still had to bring it as a widget into the main search engine. Why.

I'm just getting tired of google search results not actually being search results.

My initial thought was: "What a good way to dark pattern users into allowing Chrome to use the microphone". Tried it out and indeed using this on iOS 15 would give Chrome (seemingly permanent) microphone rights. So thanks, but no thanks. Thanks for the compliment of being creative in my hate.

The strange thing is, so far, you have to know about this to find it. If you just search "guitar tuner," it doesn't come up. You have to put "Google [instrument] tuner" with various instrument names or just "Google tuner."

Probably trying to build a case that they're just trying to compete, not steal traffic from existing sources via their position as the search provider.

you know what would also be great:

less content-generated spam (top 10 ways to feel happy... blah bla)

stop allowing sites to fool the 'sort by date feature' by changing the dates of old articles to new ones

pretty much why I add "reddit" to most of my searches, and when I don't, I'm reminded why I do.

Pretty soon Google will be mowing my lawn but still won't serve me RSS.

> still won't serve me RSS.

Well to be fair, they could probably SLAM your lawn and add it to street view data.

Whereas serving RSS has no clever telemetry/analytics for them to make any money out of (e.g. the death of Google Reader).

If I want a tuner, I've both one I keep over the amp or the small one I clip on the bass neck. They don't spy on me, don't show me ads, don't force me to keep the phone on and are much more responsive than any phone app.

Also... sorry but my phone stays off when I play music, and it's not even a smartphone; at my age the time I can spend with friends enjoying playing music is not that much anymore, and the heck if I'm risking to ruin the experience with a phone left on.

Should the link be: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+tuner

It seems they've have a few tools such as a metronome, a roll a die with multiple dies of different size, a coin flip. Even games:

https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20snake

https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20minesweeper (this seems to work only when visited via one from the other links)

https://www.google.com/search?q=play%20solitaire

To encourage microphone access.

When Google was still "do no evil" this would've been cool. Now that they are, shall we say, ambivalent about such things, it's not, because I'd rather they worked on not invading my/everyone's privacy.

Okay I'm pretty impressed. It registers my double bass, both plucked and bowed. A lot of Android tuners struggle with the bass.

Of course I just granted Chrome access to my microphone. I'll be turning that back off, thanks.

This is exactly the problem with modern software.

They don't stick to their tasks anymore, but implement all kinds of "utility"-things.

The complexity and quality suffers big time, because instead of being a good piece of software highly optimized to do a few things really well, they all become massive assortments of useless utility crap.

Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. -circa 1997

A good v1. But these skeumorphic coloured VU LEDs seem like a missed opportunity for innovation.

How about an enlarged stave-a-like with an ECG-style line on it, tracking my pitch over time, with an oversized vector showing the direction to the next half tone?

By way of analogy: Google have made a decent enough spirit level, so now give us LIDAR.

Now I can tell if my "claimed-to-have-perfect-pitch" friend is lying anywhere.

Is there any app segment or niche safe from being killed by Google?

Isn't like most of those supposedly "killed" services just moved to or merged with other services?

Isn't this another blatant case of Google abusing its position of being the gate-keeper of internet and pushing its feature above the websites that exists with the same feature for years? Same as it has been doing for things like online calculators, weather sites, currency conversions and so on.

Worse is that they don't have to really play by the rules of SEO. Any other website with tuners or weather forecasts have to fill their content with keyword crap to get noticed even if they may not really add any value to end-user. But hey, Google can push it's nice little hobby feature to the top and bankrupt other legit websites. How is this legal?

edit: Grammar

To the downvoters: I would love to hear your counter argument and change my view.

The argument right now would likely be that it doesn't show up in the google search for "guitar tuner" and needs "google guitar tuner" to be found coupled with an assumption that this is how it will always be.

It's a fair enough argument. But they should make it in response not just downvote like so many google employees not wishing to engage with a discussion about abuse of market power at all. I think I tend more toward your point of view personally, what is now isn't what will always be in search engine rankings etc, but there it is.

OP does have a point but I think a better example is when google scrapes a truncated paragraph from a website and presents that.

Agree, I take back the specific example of tuner since it doesn't show up searching only for guitar tuner or such terms. But I still stand by other snippets.

You're assuming the downvotes are due to a difference of views, and not because your writing style hasn't found its home yet. It's not that most people disagree with the substance of your commentary - there's a comment with similar argument but with a different tone as yours, currently trending on this post - but that your writing has a natural resonance with the downvote button, similar to singing the perfect note to break a wine glass with sound.

I didn't downvote but I do disagree. I see this argument often, but in practice the Google widgets tend to be well implemented and allow me to get the information I want even quicker. That's exactly the purpose of a search engine. It makes me a satisfied user.

I really don't have a problem with them denying traffic to other sites by providing users with information directly.

Agree that they are well implemented from user point of view, I use them all the time. What I do not like is that they do not have to compete with others, especially when it comes to search results. I didn't follow it in details but I believe they did get in trouble with Froogle in EU[0] for similar reasons. I guess in that case they were against big businesses who were able to fight it out but for snippets it's against hobbyist and small time one developer sites.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1...

Not a downvoter, but I find this line of argument to be very poorly thought out.

Why shouldn't google be able to paste ads for its products on certain searches? Why shouldn't amazon be able to do the same with product searches? Why shouldn't apple be able to build feature X into the OS that's currently a category of app? It's literally their product!

We can't possibly have a conversation about "regulating algorithms" like google search until there are reasonable proposals about how to do so, and I've seen exactly zero -- so until then I feel I have to assume that people making this argument just want google to just stop changing, which is a death sentence in the age of the internet.

> Why shouldn't google be able to paste ads for its products on certain searches?

Because their monopoly in search business is an illegal advantage for the other business they are promoting. (Not my words - taken from [0]). I guess it ends up being what one thinks of one business v/s others. For me, content search should be a different business from content creation.

App bundling is another area where I side with un-bundling, something Google have had issues as well[1]

I have no intention of trying to have a conversation regarding "regulating algorithms" and such, just that Google should compete fairly with other content creation and keep search business separate from others.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1... [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040889789/google-eu-android-...

So an EU commission thinks google should not be allowed to show you results from their specialized product search at the top of a results page when it thinks you're comparison shopping because rival comparison shop services can't do that? Because:

there would be a risk that a company once dominant in one market (even if this resulted from competition on the merits) would be able to use this market power to cement/further expand its dominance, or leverage it into separate markets

I mean -- yes. This is how many/most businesses grow. They leverage their existing dominance in one market to fund their entry into the next. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don't have a problem with that at all.

Is there kind of a slippery slope fear here? That if a business takes this to the extreme that they will swallow up all the other companies and then consumers will have no choice but to subject themselves to the abuse of this one company that has no incentive to treat their customers well?

Maybe that could happen, but we've never been close to that in the western world as far as I can tell. Until we get there, can we hold off on yanking the "government" ripcord? It seems to me whenever we've done that in the past, it's almost always lead to entrenchment of a particular business and not to more competition.

Also, have you taken a look at other comparison shopping sites? I mean, google shopping is far from great, but these other sites are just downright awful. Perhaps they should spend more time on bettering their product and less time schmoozing EU bureaucrats. And if they didn't do that, then certainly those EU bureaucrats have some more important issues to focus on that actually matter to the citizens they serve than inventing imagined "crimes of monopoly" that have zero victims.

Is there any point to small (or medium) software enterprize anymore? If your niche can be disrupted by a handful of incumbents with enormous reach and access to user data at whim (even when there is hardly any money in it), imagine if it is actually a potentially lucrative domain

To stick with the theme: can we recognize the screetching high pitch of the thin edge of a wedge?

Tuning a guitar can be done by relatively simple (dumb) algorithms. Recognizing a chord and more sophisticated musical elements needs the feedback and "labelling" by a large number of willing participants.

You can work out the rest of that "musical piece" yourself...

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+tuner

Imagine letting your browser have access to your mic.

Bing has had an excellent one for years already

I think this is neat and may try it. For anyone looking for an excellent tuner app, Peterson iStrobosoft is the one.

Interesting that it only resolves on 'google tuner' rather than 'guitar tuner' searches.

Laughs in renaissance tuning methods, cheers from a lutenist.

Stares in harpsichordist. Those semitones seem pretty equal. Be a shame if something happened to them.

I believe it's a bit of a disservice. People should develop a musical ear to tune their own instruments. Haven't been using tuners for about past five years. However my guitar does drift off a bit sometimes

Can anybody learn it? I thought many people were just tone deaf. Is it a myth?

Tuning off of a reference note isn't that hard, almost anyone can learn to do it. It's just more convenient to use the tuner for each string.

agree with you but you cant tune onstage/ with other instruments also tuning. the guitarist can't go "everybody shut up I'm tuning" like in the orchestra. and I believe in concert bands/ orchestras they also tune with equipments before going on stage

Why is it that all I hear is “give Google access to your microphone”?

can it handle a c7sus4aug5 open tuning?

...by tuning up, or tuning down?

How is this not abuse of power to get into the guitar tuner market? I hope they get sued by the tuner companies.

And before you respond, think how you would feel if your service was "front-run" by Google upon a user search.

So Google can't do anything that's not a complete innovation?

They can, but they can't shove their own services in front of everybody else's in their search results.

If you just search "guitar tuner," it doesn't come up. You have to specifically search for "Google guitar tuner"

What about the calculator or unit conversion?

I don't use Google myself but if this stuff is commodity I'm not sure why they couldn't shortcut the results. Users are still free to use something else if it adds value.

I obviously do not know their plans, but you (for now) have to search for "google tuner". So there's no "abuse of power" at all and nothing is "front-run" here.

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