Thursday, 10 August 2017

Quest for the Holy Tuner



            The online tuner failed me again on Wednesday morning, so later on I tried to find an actual download of tuner software so I could have something more dependable. There was a free one in Google apps but when I clicked to download it I couldn’t find it. I looked at various lists of tuners that were available and typed their names into the Pirate Bay search window. I tried downloading one called “gStrings” but nobody was seeding it. Finally one simply called “guitar tuner” came through. It turned out though to not be chromatic like I wanted. It only produced the tones for each string.
            I went for a bike ride in the afternoon under beautiful but threatening clouds. I rode up Westview north of St Clair to Tiago and then cruised east to Victoria Park. From there I travelled south, exploring all the side streets that sloped west to Glenburn as far down as St Clair.
            I decided to use the washroom once I was on the Danforth again but I missed the first Starbucks, the second one had no free post rings for locking my bike and in the third on they’d just cleaned the loos so they wanted the bleach to settle before they let people use them. I walked east to the Black Swan and felt itchy as soon as I got inside.
            There were a couple of fast riders on the College bike lane on my way home. I couldn’t get past them, though I wasn’t too far behind.
            I had pasta with Alfredo sauce and mushrooms for dinner.
            I downloaded a second guitar tuner but that turned out not to be chromatic either. Finally I found an app called AP Tuner and that was chromatic. I found it very complex at first though, with all kinds of numbers that I didn’t understand. I kept tuning my guitar according to the needle being at zero and yet the guitar was still out of tune. In the end I figured out that the column to the right of the needle was highlit on the string the program though I was trying to tune and when it was off it was because my string was tuned out of the range of the note it was supposed to play.
The program always opens with a registration window but there is an option to not register and a note that says one can use the software as long as one wants.
            So I finally had a chromatic tuner to use as a backup when I ran out of batteries for my clip-on. 

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