Korg OT-120 Orchestral Tuner

As an absolute self taught beginner, I have found this instrument to be valuable and easy to use. I don't even play a piano, but my two sons and wife do. It costs over $200 per visit to get a tuner out to our rural location and I think there is only one tuner in town. Our upright piano requires constant tuning, and so I decided to roll up my sleeves and give it a shot, after all, if someone else can learn how to do it, so can I.Researching the Internet and Amazon, I found the tools and reference materials to make an educated decision on what to buy. I selected this instrument along with a book, "Piano Servicing, Tuning, and Rebuilding: For the Professional, the Student,..." and tools to make the necessary adjustments. Within an hour of receiving all the tools, I re-tuned four badly out of tune keys. The wife and kids were impressed and the tools paid for themselves after the first attempt. With the help of the book and the Korg OT-120, I should get better at it over time. even my 12 year old son understood what was going on as he watched me (his dad) adjust the piano strings back into the correct sounding notes.I haven't used the Korg enough yet to give a detailed review, but I just know when I set the dial for "Manual" and watched the meter needle swing to the center, I was getting the results my family was hoping for.The Korg comes with a very nice storage case and I did pay the extra money to get the plug in microphone. Maybe when I get better at it, I'll come back and give a better review. I just know this instrument works as expected and gets results.

I use this for tuning our church piano. The instructions on "how to use" could be better, but overall this is worth the money. For example, the meter offers "slow, medium, or fast" meter averaging, but no instructions when each might be best. I've found, generally, "slow" is needed for the bass notes, and the faster acquisition speeds are okay for higher notes. There also seems to be a slight discrepancy b/w when the LED's indicate "center" for a note verses the meter needle, leaving the user to guess which is right. If you have a good ear (which if you really need this meter, you probably don't), you can use the "tone" mode to discern the difference. Myself, I've found that as long as long as you're consistent in HOW you read the meter, your piano will sound pretty good. If you have electronic instruments in your band, you may want to get a reading on those first (which may not be tunable), to see how they measure up. Then tune your string instruments to match on the meter.

My Boss TU 12 tuner started to fail and this Korg OT 120 is a fantastic replacement. The tunings are very precise, and the tuner is easy to use. I do studio recording and precision tuning is essential. I love the analog meter. The digital display is a bit hard to read with the tuner standing, but very easy with it laying flat. Both mic and input tunings work well that way so the display is not an issue for me. I highly recommend this tuner.Follow up to this review. I am so impressed with this tuner that I bought a backup for my recording studio. This is precision tuning.

I had a cheaper model tuner for tuning my guitar but it was always a struggle to get it to "hear" the note and the results were spotty. Not so with this tuner, it works great, picks up the note much better than my cheaper unit and allows me to tune my guitars quickly and easily. Plus it looks much cooler than my old tuner so I can leave it out on the desk. Definitely recommended!

I had an older Korg chromatic tuner that I used for years, which was made right on the cusp of the great change from analog to digital devices. I still do use it, despite a couple of broken switches, but it is kind of bulky, so I found myself shopping around for a new one.I had pretty specific requirements: I wanted both digital readout and an analog meter. I needed to be able to "tweak" the pitch reference by cents, since I sometimes work with microtonal systems and temperments other than 12-tone equal temperment. I wanted something with an internal mike and speaker, for portability, but also with input so that I could attach an external clip-on mike.The OT-120 pretty much fit the bill on all of these points. It includes a number of stock tuning systems built-in (12tet; meantone; Werkmeister etc.), but also allows you to create your own, as well as to alter any reference pitch by +/- 50-cents on the fly. There is a digital readout that supplies both the pitch in scientific notation (C4 = middle C), and the deviation, if any, in cents. There is also an analog meter that allows for some pretty fine gradations of pitch, and which centers when your pitch matches the reference pitch. The accuracy is quite good: in comparing results on this tuner to a strobe tuner, it seems to get within +/- 1 cent, on average; for a non-strobe tuner this is close to phenomenal.There is also a sensitivity control which adjusts the response time to an external signal to one of three levels: fast, medium, or slow. This is very handy if you have a source that takes a while to "settle in" to its fundamental pitch, such as a long string with a low pitch. The "fast" mode is good for sounds that lock-in fairly quickly, such as wind instruments.My one caveat with this tuner is that the case is far less well made than that of my old Korg tuner, which has seen a lot of hard use (and abuse) and is still in one piece and working. Although the OT-120 looks in some pictures as though it has a metal case, it's really silver-grey plastic, with a thin aluminum front panel. And the plastic isn't all that heavy-duty -- a moderate squeeze with the fingers easily opens up the seam in the side, and I get the feeling that I could probably do permanent damage to the case simply by crushing it in my hand. This is unfortunate given the circumstances in which this device is most likely to be used. One could easily imagine that a few falls from a music stand to the stage floor might kill this tuner -- and I seriously doubt it will last as long as my old one. This is the only thing that cost the tuner a star.Would have been nice if an AC power supply and external mike were included, but these were easily obtained as add-on accessories.That said, these tuners have come down considerably in price -- almost 50% from what they were selling for a year or two ago, so the cost savings does mitigate the flimsy case construction, somewhat. Still, I'd have happily paid $20 more to get an actual metal case, our at least double thickness on the current plastic case.There are a lot of instrument-specific tuners, with far fewer features out there, which may be more durable. But if you need to tune a lot of different kinds of instrument (as I do), or if you need to be able to design your own tuning tweaks (A=445, instead of 440, for example), Then this is definitely the most versatile tuner available for the price. Even with the light-weight case, I'd certainly buy another of these.

Tuner is terrific. I have the older version of the Korg orchestra tuner - and this is quite a bit better - range of tuning frequencies and the ability to work with all kinds of instruments.