The newest addition to the reed desk is a Stroboconn Tuner. Stephen Paulson has one of these in his bassoon studio at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It was always so fun to use his so I started hunting to find one of my own. I ended up finding it on eBay and they continue to pop up from time to time. The tuner is two separate units and they are both quite heavy so shipping was complicated.

     The display is on the top unit, it’s arranged like a keyboard and incased behind glass. There is an interesting feature between the “white keys” and “black keys” There is a plaque on the left side of the display which reads: “Instrument in key of” and an adjustable sliding mechanism. The key options are C, Eb, Dd, Bb and F; this is for people playing transposing instruments so they don’t have to do transposing math while they are playing into it.

 The bottom unit is for calibration which allows for adjustment in cents. For example some orchestras tune to A=442 which would be the change from 0 (A=440) to 7 on the tuner. This tuner works on tube technology and its my understanding that most of the tuning is done in the lower unit and the top is just the display.