Okay...Fess up. How many times....

[Shorty Medlock]

How many times have you wasted 15-20 minutes of your time trying to tune an out of whack guitar with zero success only to find out the battery in your tuner is bad?

Yesterday I grabbed my Squire 51 off the shelf and decided to try to play it a little.

Great guitar ... no tone control just a volume and a rotary selector switch.

After finding one of my great grandkids must have been playing with the tuning pegs ( for some reason they cant keep their paws off the tuners!) I could not get the guitar to tune.

It was awful...like my playing! A b turned into a d. The e was an f. Wtf?

Everything seemed to work fine on the two headstock tuners I tried. So I went looking for a third tuner when I passed my battery stash near my guitar work bench.

I thought " maybe" a low battery might cause this... bingo!!!!

Fixed!

I then got to enjoy my favorite guitar out of the seven I know own... the lowly Squire. Sparkly Fender highs Dick Dale would enjoy plus twang that makes me smile.

I recently had a little stroke that I can tell has affected a few things on me... my walk isn't as steady, my typing is
ri- dickle-lisly poor and my vision is a little foggy up close.

Therefore take the advice of a rapidly aging relic with all, or part, of nine decades on this spinning rock we call earth... I suggest you seize the day, grab your closest or favorite guitar and play it.

No matter your skill level... no matter your age... You never know when your last lick has arrived ( quoting my ex GF)!

 

[hemingway]

I thought this thread was going to be about books.

I have a LOT of tomes.

 

[Shorty Medlock]

I thought this thread was going to be about books.

I have a LOT of tomes.

haha.... I fixed it!

I'm always guilty of commenting on a spelling guffaw... I learned from a master my 3rd grade Nun Sister Mary Attila the Hun! She swung a mean ruler!

 

[Gladhander]

Still…thirty years in..forget to plug the thing in occasionally.

 

[Ricky D.]

Don’t put it off if you want to do it. Many of us are at an age where lightning can strike and suddenly later becomes can’t. My best friend was a successful studio musician in Nashville until he had a stroke. Lost his chops.

So if you are getting along in years, start living like there’s no tomorrow. Now is your chance.

 

[Wrighty]

I bought my tuner around 35 years ago and haven’t needed to replace the battery yet. Only problem is that, as I get older, I find it harder to get the pitch to remain constant for long enough. Pitch pipes take a lot of puff!

 

[Harmonic]

Could happen.

 

[Sparky2]

I love that Squier '51.

Great guitar!

 

[tap4154]

Congrats on having an unmodified Squier 51! I've got a black unmodified one just like yours. My other one is deeply modified, and now the neck is on a CV50 Telecaster.

Funny thing is I had this stored for many years unplayed, and when I finally pulled it out to start playing again it was in perfect tune.

 

[twangking]

I just tune by ear. Whether it's off or not depends on my level of inebriation.

 

[upnrunning]

Ya, grand kids, of course you know what they can do to a Gibson head stock, I make it a point to pickup one of the guitars every day, Oh, and my 13 year old grand son says I'm awesome on guitar. he's the only one in my will.

 

[Flaneur]

The tuner battery always quits, at the wrong moment. I've gone over to re-chargeables....Planet Waves. So far, so good.

 

[gridlock]

Zero times

 

[Happy Enchilada]

This thread is making me wonder if I'd be better off using battery powered headstock tuners at jams and other outings, and maybe using my ancient Korg analog tuner (the kind that's the size of a Nokia cellphone) when I'm in my rehearsal space. I should do a side-by-side and see which one's more accurate.

 

[srblue5]

I thought this thread was going to be about books.

I have a LOT of tomes.

Cyndi Lauper should start a book club and call it Tome After Tome.

 

[srblue5]

How many times have you wasted 15-20 minutes of your time trying to tune an out of whack guitar with zero success only to find out the battery in your tuner is bad?

I can't say this has come up for me when it comes to the battery but my Snark clip-on tuner is often way out of whack when I use it to tune my AO '70s Tele Custom. It works fine on my other guitars... maybe it doesn't pick up the vibrations so well on the Tele Custom's headstock?

I did once spend a lot of time at a gig repeatedly trying to tune and wondering why my guitar wasn't staying in tune. It turns out the other guitarist was drowning all of us out and his guitar was dreadfully out of tune, not mine.

I love that Squier '51.

Great guitar!

Congrats on having an unmodified Squier 51! I've got a black unmodified one just like yours. My other one is deeply modified, and now the neck is on a CV50 Telecaster.

This thread is kinda making me wish I had gotten a Squier '51 when I could have. Twice. I still remember seeing one on a rack for like $92 and for some reason, the inner voice saying "Buy that now, figure out what to do with it later" wasn't strong enough.

I have a Squier Offset Tele now, which sort of scratches the itch for a Tele neck/headstock on a non-Tele body.

 

[stxrus]

I can’t say I’ve wasted much time due to a low battery in a headstock tuner. If a guitar won’t tune up correctly the first thing I do is check the tuner. I’d say 99% of the time it’s the battery. 1% of the time is operator error

 

[Mjark]

It’s yet to happen to me but my wife knocked my little Korg tuner on the floor the other day and broke it. I bought a similar Korg replacement that came without batteries. I had to search for my discarded tuner to salvage the batteries.

 

[Alaska Mike]

I just never got used to clip-ons (I have about a dozen kicking around here) for electrics, and stick with a pedal tuner my old eyes can read. I am not really a pedal guy, so sometimes it’s just inline instead of on a board.

I still have the old Korg tuner I bought in the late ‘80s, and it still works perfectly. Does take a 9 volt once every decade.

 

[tap4154]

I can't say this has come up for me when it comes to the battery but my Snark clip-on tuner is often way out of whack when I use it to tune my AO '70s Tele Custom. It works fine on my other guitars... maybe it doesn't pick up the vibrations so well on the Tele Custom's headstock?

I did once spend a lot of time at a gig repeatedly trying to tune and wondering why my guitar wasn't staying in tune. It turns out the other guitarist was drowning all of us out and his guitar was dreadfully out of tune, not mine.



This thread is kinda making me wish I had gotten a Squier '51 when I could have. Twice. I still remember seeing one on a rack for like $92 and for some reason, the inner voice saying "Buy that now, figure out what to do with it later" wasn't strong enough.

I have a Squier Offset Tele now, which sort of scratches the itch for a Tele neck/headstock on a non-Tele body.

They were selling for $99 for all colors at GC, which is what I got my sunburst one for, and by the time I bought the black one they were only $69. One GC in my county had 2 black ones (the only Squier 51's left in Orange County, CA) so I picked the one with the cleanest neck, and left the other one. I should have grabbed it too, but decided not to be greedy. All these years later, I really appreciate it's original design much more, and am very glad I didn't mod this one. Great pickups, the tuners are solid, the knob setup is easy to use (with a push/pull bridge HB coil split on the volume pot} and the neck is AWESOME. Weighs only 7.4 lbs.