Saturday, April 30, 2011

Qwik Tune QTGP1 Guitar Professor Tuner/Chord Finder

by bestguitartuner.co.uk
 This is a cool little gadget – a guitar tuner and chord book all in one. The reviews are mostly quite good. Watch out though, on the Amazon UK site it describes this as a chromatic tuner – I’ve dug around trying to find a definite answer to this but I’m reasonably certain this is not a chromatic tuner, it only recognises standard guitar tuning. With that aside, what about the product itself?

The complaints that you do find are the same old gripes you hear about most low cost tuners… it doesn’t work with the low E string, the needle jumps about etc.. I’m starting to sound like a broken record but I’ll say it again – to some extent you need to expect this with most low to mid priced guitar tuners, even more so with ones that use the internal mic. I own one of the Qwik Tune standard guitar tuners (one without the chords) and it’s accuracy is about as good as I expect from tuners of this kind, in this price range. It’s still usable and does a pretty good job. I would suspect that the same technology is used for the Qwik Tune Guitar Professor.

The guitar can be tuned via the internal mic or by plugging a cable into the input socket. There is no output socket so the tuner cannot be used inline. The tuner can also produce tones for the standard guitar notes, basically an electronic pitch pipe. I personally like this function on any guitar tuner, although there are quite a few reports of it being too loud. How loud, I can’t tell you because I haven’t heard it.

The chord book can display something like 200+ chords. These consist of all of the twelve notes/keys and each chord can be minor, major, diminished, augmented and sus. Major chords can be 5th, 6th, 6 add 9, maj7, 7th, 9th, add 9, add 11, add 13. Minor chords can be 6th, 7th, 9th, 6add9 and 7-5 (half diminished). The sus chords can be sus2, sus4 and sus7.

That’s quite a lot of chords. Bear in mind that each chord diagram will only show one fingering for each chord so it’s not going to be as exhaustive as a decent (real) chord book. Also bear in mind that the further you dig down into the extended chords, the more button pushes you will have to put up with. But hey, it’s a gadget!

Would I buy one? Yeah maybe just for the curiosity factor and simply because it’s another gadget. Truth is, I have no need for one but that might not stop me.

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