$12.99 Phatty/Voyager Tuner Solution

The Moog Forum Moog Music General Topics Forum
1

{I promise this is not a sales pitch, just a useful, cheap tip.}

I just got one of these for my Little Phatty and it works great.
Put it in the headphone jack and you can tip it to exactly the
right viewing angle. There’s also a built-in LED flashlight.

Retail $30, but on sale for $12.99:

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PitchjackBK/
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PitchjackWh

And the blinking yellow LEDs look cool with the Phatty.
(Keep Headphone Vol knob low so as not to clip the tuner.)

2

Cool! I have an old Danelectro guitar tuner I sometimes use. It cost a lot more than $12.99, though.

3

Cool little tool. This should be included with every analog synth you sell. In fact every analog synth manufacturer, including Moog, should supply something like this with their products.
At least Bob Moog gave us an A-440 reference on the Minimoog D. I still don’t understand why it wasn’t included on the Voyager though…

For someone who might not have a guitar tuner, or another way of tuning their analog synth, this $13 little gizmo should come in handy. Thanks for showing it Dan.

4

Great idea, and by no means do I want to FUD you, but in the past people have had issues with using the headphone out for unintended purposes.

I can’t find a value for input impedance for the tuner; the last thing you want is to load the headphone output too much (you’ll fry it). Also, the jack plug is mono, into a stereo socket, so one channel will be shorted to ground.

Just my 0.000166 of a barrel of oil.

5

good point. Exact reason why Moog does not support using the headphone out fed back into the audio input in case someone uses a mono jack.

6

Upon careful examination of that device, it is intended to be used with electric guitars and bass guitars by plugging into their output jack. Not a headphones jack. In other words, there is most probably a small preamp circuit in there to raise the level to be measured. You will probably damage the unit by plugging it into a headphones jack, which is hundreds of times more powerful than the output from guitar pick-ups. Unless it is specified that it can be used that way (which I didn’t see anywhere on Korg’s site), I wouldn’t try it. Although if you bust it up, you’ll only have waisted about $15.

BTW, you cannot damage a headphones output by shorting one, or even two of its outputs because on the vast majority of them there are some internal shunting resistors that will absorb and dissipate any short-circuits as a little heat.

7

I would hope there would be a protective circuit, but I thought I read somewhere that over a long period of time, you can run the risk of frying out the headphone out circuit.

8

Of course, if you drive that headphones output at maximum volume, while shorting out its outputs for an extended period of time, you will run the risk of busting those small resistors… But the occasional shorting out, at a moderate to low level shouldn’t do any damage. Unless, that headphones output is directly driven by an internal small dual op-amp without any output resistors (as it has been seen sometimes in low quality Chinese audio products).

9

Very cool hardware tuner option!

I use my phone and this tuner app:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cleartune-chromatic-tuner/id286799607?mt=8

I realize it’s not an option for everyone but it works great no extra stuff needed. :slight_smile:

10

this is why Tom Oberheim played a blinder by including an A440 tone on my lovely SEM Pro…quick tune up of the SEM, my Voyager & Dark Energy in a flash.

Moog -take note :wink:

11

My only wish is that the a440 tone was a little louder at full volume, but agreed it is SUCH a useful feature to have on an analog synth. :slight_smile: