Snarks Work!
 

Have to admit.

I have a Snark, an Ibanez PU10, and a Peterson StroboClip. They all work just fine.

Oh Snarks work alright! I just cant bear the "Sticky" so both of mine have been given away .
Lots of alternatives to choose from ,but my latest delight is the Fishman FT-2 . It turns itself off and I like that.

They work, and are good for quick and dirty. For recording, and anything important though, it's a Peterson StroboClip for me. Way more accurate.

Sure, they work. Until they don’t.

How long, how well, that’s the difference.

I have two. They work great according to my touch. Rarely have to change the battery.

I'm a fan of Snarks for my acoustics.

Jeez, you've got to have pretty precise hearing to hear any difference. I think I've got pretty good relative pitch -- I notice when a singer is flat. A snark is just fine with me. In fact, it's not a terrible thing to tune the E and A strings just a hair flat because fretting a string sharpens it a hair.

I don't think my hearing is all that great, but the difference between a snark and a Peterson Stroboclip is enormous. To me, it's the difference between 'utterly horrible' and 'great'.

I used to have one tuner for a loooong time. It was an Intellitouch, and seemed to work well enough. When it finally went kaput, I went to the local guitar store and got a new tuner. They only had Snarks, so that's what I got. I figured one brand was as good as another.

Went home and tuned the guitar to the Snark. Strummed it. Ears bled. It was nowhere near in tune; it was just hideous. It would be tough to make a guitar sound worse if you tried.

I figured there had to be something wrong with the Snark, so I took it back to the store. Showed the manager the issue. It was obvious to him, too. So we opened up a new Snark in the store and tried it out. Same thing--utterly horrible out-of-tuneness that was painful to listen to, like fingernails on a chalkboard. Obvious to both of us.

So we tried a 3rd Snark. Same thing again. I cannot possibly express how low my opinion of Snark was by this point. They were all just ridiculously bad. They didn't put guitars in tune, they put them out of tune. Badly.

At that point I got on AGF and started researching tuners. Turns out that some other people have the same problem with Snarks, and that Peterson Stroboclips are designed to be far more accurate, and are held in high esteem by a lot of the folks who dislike the Snarks. So I ordered a Peterson online, and....

PURE HEAVEN!

All of my guitars sounded great again. Not only did they sound great, they sounded better than they've ever sounded before; most likely because they were in better tune than they had ever been before.

I told the leader of my local NSAI songwriter group about the Stroboclip, and he bought one, too. He's been playing for 50 years, and had the same reaction as me: he was shocked at the difference in quality/accuracy, and says that all of his guitars now sound significantly better than they ever have before.

When covid started breaking out with the first public cases being reported in China way back in early January, and I looked down the road and saw a probable pandemic and shipping disruptions, I didn't just make sure my family had enough food, meds, and toilet paper....I ordered a backup Peterson Stroboclip and enough AAA batteries to power my 2 Stroboclips for a decade.

I will never use a Snark as a backup, since they just don't work imo. What they call 'working' I call 'failing badly'. I would much rather use a tuning fork, or tune to someone else, or just tune entirely by ear with no reference point: all of those options would make my guitars sound far better than using a Snark. But my #1 option is the Stroboclip, since it makes my guitars sound far better than any other tuning option does.

Yeah, they mostly work. But they eat batteries at an enormous rate, they get sticky as rubber cement, their clips will occasionally explode when you least expect it most, and they're only reasonably accurate. I don't like futzing with strobe tuners unless I'm setting intonation (more of an electric thing than acoustic given my meager setup skills), so I find a Dadarrio soundhole tuner better and vastly convenient (with amazing battery life) and a TC Polytune (or Unitune) better still and they have a decent optional strobe mode for when you need it. Also pick up the low E better than most tuners (including the Snark and Dadarrio) and pretty decent battery life.

I've had a few Snarks - they're all dead and gone at this point. I can't imagine why I'd ever buy another one given the alternatives.

-Ray

I love my Snarks!

I was given one as case candy from the dealer when I bought my Avalon. It just recently gave up working properly so I bought another. It's great when you just want to see "D" and be done with it. I have a Peterson Stroboclick HD that has sat in a desk drawer for a year and I have to start using it though. No sense in wasting it. I'll just use both side by side until I get the moving target display of the Peterson under my belt.

On the subject of Snarks, has anybody seen or know anything about the new Silver Snark that came out in September?

The price seems to hover at around $19.99 at most online sites.

The ads state it offers "Hyper-Snark Software (which) delivers faster, more precise tuning than previous Snarks." However, as with other Snark products that I have researched, there is no actual mention of the accuracy of the tuning ... which I find confusing because it supposedly offers "more precise tuning" but there is no comparison offered. It's just "better" ... that's all.

However looking at the design pics I do see one change that excites me. There are two vulcanized rubber collars, one around those fragile (to me at least) trio of pivot clamps at the bottom of the head. I've had three or four Snarks break and all of them have broken at one of those points.

I think the collar will add extra support and reduce the chance of the points breaking. In fact in another post I mentioned that I found that using a Zip tie encircling those points will help and I used that method to repair my last broken Snark.

I will be getting a Snark N-5 on Monday. I ordered that one partially because its redesigned pivot I think will be much harder to break than on the regular Snarks. However had I known about the Silver Snark I may have ordered one of that model and I'm certain my next Snark will be the Silver Snark or any Snark that has these rubber collars.

Me too.

I have the same SN-2 since they first came out, which seems like something like 15 years ago. It still works fine.

I've since purchased a bunch of tuners, simply because I'm a gadget guy and like to try out stuff. I bought the SN-8 (super tight) Snark and liked that one even better. I've since regressed and bought the super-cheap one button LARGE display Snark Napoleon N5 tuner.

I've never had one break, although it seems like that's a complaint from a lot of users. I'd suggest that the number of broken ones may have something to do with the shear number of Snarks that have been sold.

Although there could be a problem with "accuracy" in a small batch of tuners from any brand my guess is "inaccuracy" is more a problem with an instrument setup and/or the player's level of experience.

I've only been playing for 55 years, so I may see an "inaccurate" electronic tuner if I keep looking and live long enough. The lack of understanding the peculiarities of equal temperament tuning are probably a lot more responsible for misunderstanding of "tuner accuracy" than actual deviation from note values.

I use Snarks because I like to have one in each case. They're cheap enough for that, and they work well enough for me. I've had maybe 8 of them, and one quit working, and another I popped the socket (but it still works).

D.H.