Korg LCA-120 Chromatic Tuner

The Korg LCA120 Chromatic Tuner intrigued me with its large backlit display, slim profile and long battery life. Those attributes plus a host of inessential but interesting features - user-defined temperament, "focus tuning", and a built-in (uncalibrated) sound-level meter - and a low price prompted me to give this tuner a try despite already having a Peterson virtual strobe tuner.

The first thing I noticed upon unpacking this unit was that Korg did a really poor job of designing the battery door. It slides off at the slightest touch. It's going to take a bit of tape to keep the door from getting lost in normal use.

That consideration aside, the LCA120 is a useful tool. The large LCD display can be read from a considerable distance and has a selectable bright green backlight for use in poor ambient lighting conditions.

The real news, though, is in the accuracy of this tuner. Before buying my first Peterson I had always preferred Korg tuners because they gave me more predictable, accurate results than other brands of LED-and-needle tuners, including the revered Boss TU series. The LCA120 in its standard tuning mode continues the Korg tradition of reliable tuning. Turning on the "focus tuning" mode is like taking a magnifying lens to the display. When the played note is close to being in tune the display changes from the normal full-scale range of +/- 50 cents to a "focussed" view of +/- 10 cents. This is literally a five-times magnification of the resolution of the display.

You're probably wondering, as was I, how Korg's "focus tuning" stacks up against Peterson's virtual strobe technology. The short answer is that they produce comparable results. Used side-by-side, tuning with either tuner gave a stable in-tune reading on the other. The difference is in how quickly you can get there.

While the Peterson responds extremely quickly and definitively, the Korg seems to require a bit of interpretation and coddling. The Korg behaves more predictably with lower input signals. My guitars have vintage-output pickups, but I had to roll the volume way down in order to get the best behavior from the LCA120. I suspect that players who use high-output or active pickups will have a difficult time with the LCA120.

The LCA120 in "focus mode" tends to overstate a note's pitch during the attack. I know that this is a real physical phenomenon caused by the imperfect elasticity of steel strings. What I don't know is whether the Korg is reporting these pitch transients accurately or exhibiting some other kind of "settling behavior" in its pitch detection. (Conversely, I have suspected for some time that the Peterson employs heuristics in order to give a more stable display for sustained pitches. I have noticed that the current crop of Peterson virtual strobe tuners freeze the display when they can't lock on to a pitch.)

At the moment it takes me longer to tune with the Korg than with the Peterson. I suspect that this gap will narrow but not disappear as I become more accustomed to the behavior of the Korg. Either way, the guitar is accurately tuned. This is quite the accomplishment for the Korg LCA120, considering that it sells for a third of the Peterson's price.