Customer Reviews

Korg CA-40 Large Display Auto Chromatic Tuner

5 star:		(119)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am not a musician, but I love "playing" the ukulele as a way to amuse myself and relax at the end of a long day. Unfortunately I have trouble tuning my instrument because I am not so blessed with a tin ear. I have trouble determining when I have my uke strings in tune. I can get close, but often an off pitch string sounds OK to me.

I really never heard of an electronic tuner before I discovered the Korg CA-40 as a recommended product based on my purchasing history on the [...]. The price tag on the thing was so cheap I thought I could buy one and gamble that it was a remedy for my problem tuning the ukulele.

The tuner arrived and I was amazed at how easy it was to use and how nice my ukulele sounded once it was tuned properly. The Korg CA-40 "listens" to a string and an easily read screen along with a series of lights tell me what note a given string is sounding. The device automatically shows if a string is sharp or flat so I know to tighten or loosen it on the way to the proper sound.

I read some reviews of the Korg CA-40 by real musicians and was quickly intimidated by jargon and comments I didn't understand. I thought the tuner might be something a genuine amateur would find overly complicated to use. Not so--actually the tuner is probably more useful to a novice with a dumb ear than to the pro with perfect pitch. This thing is a winner.

I'm a professional classical musician, play viola, and use this every day. I usually use it with the Korg CM-100 tuner clip, which makes it even faster and more accurate, faster and more accurate IMO than the KORG OT-12 which costs much more. I also find it more accurate than the CA-30. It can easily track one note per second, and if my pitch is very accurate so it doesn't have to hunt much, it can even zero in in half a second, so I can actually practice passages with it. Batteries last a LONG time. A truly excellent tuner.

I just purchased one of these little tuners from Amazon last week. Though my guitar is low quality, (that's the next thing I'm going to buy) tuning it using only the meter mode of the tuner made it sound quite good, much better than my ear tuning. This thing is sensitive, accurate, and incredibly easy to use. What else do you want?

I have two autoharps to tune. That is 72 strings in all. Sometimes it is difficult to pick up the low strings with other tuners, but this one does the job just fine. Easy to read display, even for old eyes. Nice and light and easy to take with you. Battery lasts a long time.

This is an excellent tuner. It's a fine choice for a band or orchestra instrument, where exact intonation is under the control of the performer. It is accurate, responsive (will lock onto staccato notes), can produce a user-selectable reference tone and can be calibrated in 1 Hz steps from A=410 to A=480.

The last-selected calibration and reference tone are remembered when the tuner is off, until the batteries are replaced. Unlike some tuners, the reference tone is a tone, not a buzz. A good optional clip-on microphone is available, but the built-in mic works fine unless there is a lot of ambient noise. Small enough to fit in most instrument cases and sits securely on a standard music stand.

A close look at the display will reveal the needle moves in 2-cent increments. That means, assuming the electronics are perfectly accurate, this tuner will show anything between +/- 1 cent off the target pitch as perfectly in tune. That's a trivial difference for most orchestral and band instruments, because the performer is continuously adjusting intonation by ear, over a much greater range than +/- 1 cent.

However, it's not ideal for any instrument where intonation is relatively fixed, such as a guitar, because many trained musicians can hear a difference in the .3 cent range. Bottom line, a chord played by a guitar tuned solely with this or any other low-cost electronic tuner will sound out-of-tune to many people. As your ear develops, it will sound worse.

You could fine-tune by ear once the instrument is rough-tuned with the tuner. Or, better, tune one string to match the tuner's reference tone (or a tuning fork), then tune the other strings to each other by ear.

Technicians and studio musicians who don't want to tune by ear often use a strobe tuner, such as those made by Peterson or Sonic Research (most other brands are ordinary tuners with a strobe display). These are more accurate than most musicians can hear, are expensive, and take a day or two to get used to.

Korg LCA-120 Focus Tune Chromatic Tuner with Large Backlit LCD performs almost as well as a strobe tuner for a lot less money. Its Focus Tune feature automatically switches the full display from +/- 50 cents to +/- 10 cents, so the display resolution becomes about .5 cents, 4-times better than the CA-40. Most musicians would be satisfied with that. It also has a larger display with back light, adds jacks for headphones and external power, and volume control for reference tone. It's bulkier, unstable on a music stand, and probably more likely to be damaged if dropped. So I prefer the CA-40 for orchestral instruments, LCA-120 for guitar, and a certified technician with a good ear for piano.

Another alternative is software: TB Strobe Tuner. It's as accurate and precise as a real strobe tuner, and probably easier to use, provided a computer with a mic is handy. It generates a serial number based on your computer configuration. When you buy a license, you send this number to the developer to bypass the program's annoying trial mode. If you subsequently need to make a hardware change, such as upgrading a hard drive, it will revert to trial mode until you send the new serial number to the developer - a minor inconvenience unless the developer decides to stop supporting it. A license is very inexpensive and covers up-to-3 computers.

I play guitar and electric bass, and I've used many different electronic tuners over the past twenty years. This Korg tuner is one of the best I've ever used, only equaled by another Korg model I own. Compared to other tuners I've used, the Korg tuners have extremely accurate pitch - I get perfect tuning every time. The Korg tuners are also extremely good at "locking in" to the exact note you play while tuning, while many other electronic tuners hunt around and do a poor job of staying locked to the note from the instrument while you tune.

This inexpensive Korg tuner is also a chromatic tuner, meaning it still works even if you tune your guitar down to, say, E-flat rather than E tuning. This gives you more flexibility than the specialized guitar/bass electronic tuners, which can only recognize E, A, D, G, B, E guitar tuning.

This tuner has no illumination of its own, so it is not a good choice for tuning up on a dark stage. It is also not an inline tuner, so it is not ideal for tuning up unobtrusively in front of an audience. But for practice, rehearsal, or before-the-show tuning, it is perfect. It's inexpensive, and works very well - what more can you want?

This small tuner does an excellent job. The only place I have a problem tuning a celtic harp with it is the very highest notes (B6 and C7). Other than that it is a very well designed and well made tuner.

Let me start off by saying that I have never owned a stringed instrument until a friend recently gave us their piano. It's obvious that I knew nothing about how to tune them. I did a little reading and came across this device and some other sites that had some very basic "how to" instructions.

When my son wanted to take piano lessons at home, It was clear, even to my ears, that it was severely out of tune. The person that we got it from had it in direct sunlight for hours a day and had not tuned it in over 4 years. I decided to get one of these and have a go at tuning the piano myself instead of paying someone else $50 each time.

The first obstacle I found was getting the proper wrench for the square 1/4" pegs used to adjust the note of each key. After looking around, nobody local had a square socket. A small wrench would just slide off, so that was no good. It does require some torque to adjust the strings. Then it struck me - I have sockets for different size ratchets, which includes a whole socket set with a 1/4" square opening on one side. I took my 3/8" breaker bar and used a 7/16" 12-point socket backwards, and viola! Piano tuning wrench! It worked very well, too.

Off to tuning the piano. Fortunately, I had ordered some mutes (rubber wedges) even though I didn't know what they were for. I saw many auctions for them, so I figured they were importantant. They are. For the lower notes, they were just one string each so no mute was needed. Then about a third of the way up the keys, each note was made of two strings. You need to put a mute on one so you can tune each string individually. The higher third of the keyboard has 3 strings per key which takes two mutes and patience to get tuned correctly.

This tuner did a fantastic job except for one area - the lower 6 keys or so. It did say in the owners manual that it may have troubles with very low and very high notes. So I just tuned those to sound harmonious with the middle keys that this helped me dial in.

On a few keys, the note would jump around, like from C to F# to B and back to C. It probably had to do with where I placed the unit, but I didn't have troubles with several of the other keys.

The green LED lights when you've hit the jackpot, and the LCD display shows you how far off it is and what note you just played. It can do some other things, but I just used it to help quickly get this piano in tune.

After about 2-3 hours of patiently tuning each key, I was done. My son's piano teacher said the tuning job was pretty good (pat myself on the back.) It's certainly not a concert-grade job, but neither is that really old piano.

For the price of this, you just can't go wrong. It so easy, even this first timer felt confident in using it.

This tuner works fine and is worth the small amount I paid for it. It is very sensitive. I have to turn the cooler (which plays Bb) off before I use it. One drawback. You must shut it off when you're done, otherwise it will be ruined. I have another tuner that shuts off automatically. I always do shut them off, but I prefer the safety feature. Both tuners are accurate, simple, easy to understand and use.

I use the tuner for a six-string acoustic guitar. It worked well right out of the box. I just popped in the included batteries, pressed the "on" switch and the unit did its thing.
The only shortcoming I've found has nothing to do with its function. There is a small fold-out support piece built into the back of the unit to aid in standing it in an upright position; it works fine on a hard, level surface but is virtually useless on anything else.