The British Steelies Society

Been using Cleartune on iPhone for a while because of its sweetened tunings. It works ok but the needle jumps about a lot.
Just discovered via American forum, a freebie app called PitchLab Pro which can also be sweetened, which is much easier to use. Two questions.... is anyone else using this? .......or .....should I just stop being a cheapscate and get a Peterson Strobo plus....which seems to be as good as it gets, (as long as it’s easy to use).

Cheers Stuart.

P.S. thanks for the welcome to the forum a while back.

Hi Stuart, I use PitchLab Pro, it works very well and I find it very accurate and stable. It has it's limitations i.e. you can only adjust a pitch value globally i.e. if you set E to be +5 cents, this will affect all E's in every octave. However for the price it is great value and works very well.

I have been using it for a couple of years with no problems. Recently I have been considering buying a Peterson tuner, I think I will probably try their app first, although a review I read in the past didn't rate it very highly and it was costing around £30. It has since come down in price, £8.50, and others have told me it works well, so will be giving it a try.

For the cost PitchLab Pro is well worth checking out and if it works for you great, if not then it's not a big loss. I started by entering sweetening values from other players i.e. Sid Hudson worked well for me, then adjusted the values by ear to suit my steel. Here's a link to Sid Hudsons sweetened values.

https://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtop ... ght=tuning

Edit - Sorry just remembered, I don't think the Peterson app comes with the sweeteners, I believe they are an extra cost if you only purchase the app and not the hardware tuner. Will check this out.

Hi Stuart, I checked the Peterson app out a few months ago and my memory isn't what it used to be! Just checked it out again and I remember why I didn't go for it at the time.

The basic app doesn't include the sweeteners, these have to be bought separately, not sure of the cost but around £30 springs to mind from looking into this previously, further to that the sweeteners only work on Apple IOS phones and are not available for Android phones. In fact the Android version is very limited, just a basic tuner from what I can see. In the specs it says user presets are not available for either IOS or Android, so it looks like even with IOS you can only use the sweeteners as they are and not adjust and save them as user presets. Perhaps someone that uses the app can confirm that or otherwise. Here is a link to that info, the Specification tab is where you'll find it.

https://www.petersontuners.com/products/istrobosoft/

As I use an android phone the app is useless for my needs, so I decided if I was going down the Peterson route it would be a hardware tuner. Still not sure if I really need it as Pitchlab Pro pretty much does what I need, but I may send a letter to Santa later in the year

Geoff, do you go into pitchlab via some kind of connector? Or, is it via the phone's Mic?
If it is via the Mic, and it currently meets your needs, the only advantage of using the Peterson HD, or any other dedicated tuner for that matter, would be the ability to tune in a noisy environment.

Danny Mitchell wrote:Geoff, do you go into pitchlab via some kind of connector? Or, is it via the phone's Mic?
If it is via the Mic, and it currently meets your needs, the only advantage of using the Peterson HD, or any other dedicated tuner for that matter, would be the ability to tune in a noisy environment.

Hi Danny, I use a lead I made up, it is essentially a 1/4" mono jack to a 4 pole 2.5mm jack, so it bypasses and cuts out the inbuilt mic. On my Samsung phone the headphone/input socket has tip = left out, 2nd connector = right out, 3rd connector = input, 4th connector = ground, I believe this is a common configuration on most mobiles these days.

I do like the big display on the Peterson though and the fact you can tweak the same note in different octaves with different values, which could be useful on the lower strings on the Universal.

The jury's still out on this one with me, Pitchlab Pro is a really good stable tuner though.

Thanks for your input folks,
I feel that Mrs Stan is looking into this as well, as I will soon be the birthday boy again, for more times than I care to remember!
She likes chatting to Gerry Hogan who has a Strobo HD jobbie at a reasonable price. So it seems unfair not to let her open her little pink purse and let some of her pretty purple butterfly’s pop out in his direction.

If you used PitchLab for your recent video Jiff, it must be good. It was a cracker. Inspirational for a relative beginner. Thanks, and let’s see another soon.

I’ll be a very lucky boy if a Peterson lands on my lap, but I would recommend PitchLab to anyone who needs a reliable free tuner for the phone.

Best regards,
Stuart.

Thanks Stuart. If you get the Peterson let us know how you get on with it

I don't want to hi-jack this thread, but when I saw reference to the Sid Hudson tuning, i thought I should intervene.
I have no idea what instrument Sid is offering his tuning to, but when I tried it, it sounded like my mother had tried to tune a steel (and she's been dead for quite a while!) Maybe it's an autoharp he's tuning, but it was not a sweet(ened) pedal steel guitar!

Hi Nick, works for me up to a point, though I changed some of the settings. Here are mine below. On the PitchLab Pro temperament setup it is not possible to put an entry for A so I had to leave that at zero. I changed E from 0 to 3.5 to compensate for cabinet drop with AB pedals engaged. When I measure the actual cabinet drop on E with AB engaged to is around 5-6 cents, so the 3.5 is a compromise so it's not too sharp on no pedals but not too flat on AB engaged. The E adjustment was done by ear.

I set C to -9, can't remember exactly why, possibly tuned it by ear and adjusted the offset to suit, also changed his C# from - 16.7 to -14, again probably tuned by ear then made the offset adjustment.

Apart from that the values are the same. I would say on open with no bar with AB down it sounds a bit off, but works fine on any position with the bar on. I have a compensator which raises string 6 slightly when the F lever is engaged for the AF combination otherwise it sounds flat on string 6, but this is true for any temperament I've tried.

I use this temperament to tune all strings and pedals, including my B6 pedals on the Uni, though I also slightly tweak the B6 pedals by ear.

This temperament is supplied with Peterson tuners in their steel guitar sweeteners, and reading through the thread others say it worked well for them.

What tuner and pedal steel did you use to try it?

A 0
Bb 0
B 1.3
C -9
Db -14
D -7.6
Eb -9.7
E 3.5
F -27.8
Gb 2.5
G -3.7
Ab -12.2