[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by KarenB

Wondering if you can feel the difference between 14:1 and 18:1?

Hi KarenB

I sure can. All my main guitars are 18:1 ratio except one which is 21:1 ratio. My Voyage-Air is less sensitive, but it works just fine too.

That said, I can tune-n-tweak any guitar that's handed to me as long as it has decent quality tuners on it. When I upgraded from Grover to Schaller tuners, it was far easier to nail the tuning with my guitars with the same ratio.

When I upgraded from Schaller to Gotoh it was a complete game changer in the arena of tweaking pitches - especially with a decent tuner (Peterson, Korg Sledgehammer, TC Polytune etc.)

I do a lot of Dropped D tuning back and forth between standard on the fly, and the 21:1 takes two turns to land the full step change where the 18:1 is really at my limits but I can do it in a single motion. With a 14:1 or 15:1 the string moves further quicker, but with less fine-tuning capability. I used 15:1 ratio tuners for years, and learned to nail the drop/return and would drop below the D and back up to it in a quick simple motion.

I think with a decent quality digital-clip-on-tuner, any decent tuning machine will work. I get really nit-picky when tuning, so the 18:1 or 21:1 work nicely for me. It's certainly a personal thing.

The graph-tech RATIO tuners are designed so each string has a different tuning ratio to supposedly cause each string to respond the same as the rest when tuning (same amount of turn yields same amount of pitch change). That's not an issue with me, but I'd love to try it out sometime.