Boss TU-2 Tuner – Must Have

I picked up the Boss TU-2 Chromatic Stomp Box Tuner about 10 years ago. Prior to that, I owned a series of digital tuners that I would include with a various looper pedals to keep the tuning on the ground. I remember how much I appreciated the quality and effectiveness of the Boss Tu-2 tuner immediately.

It is incredibly easy to view under various types of stage lighting and conditions, and is versatile in the sense that you can use it as a kill switch or mute while switching guitars, etc. It can also be used a power supply to power up your other pedals via daisy chain power cable.

Here are the official features for this pedal from Boss.

• BOSS world-renowned TU-Series tuner accuracy in a convenient stompbox design
• Mute/Bypass select for silent tuning with a single stomp
• 11-point LED indicators and new “stream” meter display tuning discrepancy via speed and direction of LEDs (speed of LED movement gets slower as pitch becomes more accurate)
• 7-segment LED displays string and note names, easily visible on dark stages
• Seven easy tuning modes include Chromatic, Guitar Regular, Guitar Flat, Guitar Double Flat, Bass Regular, Bass Flat, Bass Double Flat
• Tuning mode setting and display style choice stored in memory
• Adjustable reference pitch from 438 to 445Hz
• 8-octave tuning range—the widest in its class
• Footswitchable Tuner Off mode preserves battery life by disabling LEDs

Now, if you’ve been following this blog, and you haven’t please do (you can follow me by subscribing to our RSS and receive updates via email or follow me on Twitter), you’ll remember a post a few days ago where I discuss buffered bypass. Many of the pedals today are true-bypass, and that is always listed as a ‘feature’ of the pedal, but if you’re signal has nothing but true-bypass, you could be experiencing some potential tone issues.

I’m still trying to put the pieces together and there is a lot of debate and discussion out there on the topic, but by having a completely true-bypass line, you’ll be converting your cables into capacitors, basically darkening your tone due to the length of the signal path. One way to correct this is by adding a couple of buffered bypass items in the chain to alter the impedance of the guitar signal.

I’m mentioning this because the Boss TU-2 has buffered input/output stages to achieve this. If you have many pedals and good cable length, you might want to try to add the pedal as the first thing or last thing depending cable lengths and number of pedals, etc. Some guys like to have a buffer at the front and the end of their line.

Bottom line, the Boss TU-2 Chromatic Stomp Box Pedal is a must-have for any guitarist pedal board out there. They’re built to last and just plain work.. forever. I’ve had mine for 10 years now and it works like the day I got it with countless stomps on it.

You can pick up the TU-2 at Musician’s Friend for $99.