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PT-16 Chromatic-F tuner
PT-01A Guitar Tuner
Farley's Musical Essentials

Consider the lowly pitch pipe. Poorly suited to its task, it depends on the proper amount of air across its reeds to produce the proper tone. Breathe into it too heavily or too softly, and you get an improperly tuned instrument string, and an instrument that resembles nothing so much as it does a lame and agonized cat. Pitch-pipe reeds get bent or broken, producing the same discordant result. And yet, absent some reliably tuned behemoth like a piano or organ, the pitch pipe has historically been musicians' device of limited choice for reference in keeping their instruments in tune.

Enter the Farley's Musical Essentials, of Gold Hill, Oregon, to save the day with Pocket Tones. These tuners emit factory-set tones appropriate to the strings of several different instruments: guitar, mandolin, violin, banjo, tenor banjo, and cello. Two additional models produce full chromatic scales, one each in the keys of F and C.

All a user has to do is push a button and tune a string until the string and tuner match, and - voila! - each string, and thus the instrument, is in perfect tune.

The tuners are simplicity itself to use. Each the size of the key-ring fob for a remote-unlocking car, they fit easily in the pocket or instrument case. Each is made to fit on a key ring, so it's easy to insure that you don't drive away without it.

I have the Pocket Tones PT-01A for guitar and Pocket Tones PT-16 Chromatic-F scale in front of me. The guitar tuner offers the six traditional guitar string tones: E, A D, G, B and high E. One button allows me to select which of the tones I want to hear; the other button produces the audible tone. Another push on that button kills the tone.

Though I'm not a guitar player, I have access to one, and also have been told that I have a good sense of pitch. Tuning the top five strings of the guitar presented no problems. The bottom E, however, was more difficult. The tone oscillator for that pitch produced some harmonics that could be a little confusing, and the guitar at hand might have had a faulty tuning screw. Whatever the cause or combined causes, it took a minute or two for me to get that string tuned to a degree of accuracy that I felt comfortable with.

The Chromatic-F tuner is even simpler to use. Each of twelve buttons is labeled with the tone it will produce. Push the button; get the tone. Push it again, and the tone is silenced. I immediately set out to play the F scale, but, sure enough, hit the B natural instead of the B flat, but that mistake was my own and easily corrected. I was a bit disappointed that the scale went from F to E but offered no high F at the top of the scale. However, tuning an octave above the low F should be easy enough, and the sacrifice is reasonable, considering the economy of size in Farley's design.

The chromatic tuner has another nifty feature: a volume control. It would be possible to turn the tuner's speaker down very low and discreetly tune on the stage, perhaps even on the fly, in an emergency.

Finally, for the bored or stranded, the chromatic-F tuner can be pressed into service as an extremely primitive keyboard. I managed, after a fashion, to wring "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Hava Negilah" out of it in less than a minute. In a pinch, my wife could learn her church-choir vocal parts by playing them on it. She would have to concede, though, that consecutive same-pitch quarter notes would be held over instead of separated. The button action is just not sensitive enough for such rapid on-off cycles, nor was it meant or designed to be. Still, it's nice to know that, within limits, the possibility exists.

At $12.95 for the guitar tuner and $14.95 for the chromatic-F tuner, the Pocket Tones are good buys for everyday musicians looking for simple and economic ways to keep their instruments accurately tuned. They are not a panacea; there are other more accurate - and far larger and more expensive - devices for providing that. And for the (admittedly odd) phenomenon of the musician with a tin ear, they're really not much help at all, dependent as they are on the musician's ability to discern what matches the tuner's tones and what doesn't. However, for casual get-togethers and even for regular night-club performances, the Farley's Pocket Tones tuners provide consistency, convenience and versatility in helping to insure that your instruments are tuned accurately and that your performance within that parameter remains polished and professional.