When I played with “Sensation” - the showband - in 1980-81 we had a myriad of instruments to tune. These were instruments which did not like to stay in tune like a Minimoog, guitars and several types of horns. The glue which held our tunings together was the Conn ST11 Strobe Tuner.
Our Conn Strobe Tuner was late 1970’s vintage and sat on its own table almost equidistant from everyone in the band who needed - all of us. Before each set began we would all take turns getting in key because the Conn - like the Wizard of Oz - was almighty and never wrong.
Technically, this is how it worked:
“Disc strobe tuners employ microprocessor-controlled stepper motors for driving the disc(s) to facilitate the use of customized tuning schemes, such as unequal temperaments and stretch tuning. The tuning schemes are stored in a look up table and may be programmed by the user. The single disc embodiment preferably employs an auto note detector which determines the identity of a note being played by an instrument, and causes the microprocessor to adjust the speed of the stepper motor almost instantaneously to a speed assigned to that note in accordance with a selected tuning scheme. This enables a user to play through a series of notes rapidly to verify whether they are in tune with the selected tuning scheme.”
Did you get that?
However, this venerable “mother-of-all-tuning-forks” had it drawbacks:
- Must be plugged in.
- Must turn wheel manually to note being checked.
- Must be shaded in full sunshine.
- Heavy
- Expensive
- Expensive to fix
- Fragile
In the ’80s, the strobe tuner continued its dominance, with rivaling manufacturers striving but failing to emulate the elusive strobe display by other means. The Conn tuner ebbed with the digital age in 1985 and what was left of their Strobotuner division was bought by Peterson, a company which continues to service the Conn tuner line and provide documentation and parts for Conn tuner products.
But it was a godsend for tuning my Yamaha Electric Grand!
Stumble it!