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Yooooo, BossPedalGuy here

EDIT: Wow I’m really surprised and saddened that this pedal has been discontinued! I don’t really get it, unless they are coming out with a better version, but I haven’t seen one yet. I still recommend this pedal if you get a chance to pick up a used one.

Today I’m going to review probably the most important and most popular pedal Boss has ever produced, the TU-2 Chromatic Tuner. It doesn’t make any crazy noises, it doesn’t look fancy, and it doesn’t get you laid. It’s a tuner! It allows you to quickly and easily tune your guitar which does in fact, make you sound better.

The Tu-2 isn’t the most accurate tuner available, it isn’t the best looking tuner, and it’s not the cheapest (nor the most expensive), but it is the most durable and reliable tuner available. In my opinion, it is the best tuner due to it’s very high tolerance of physical abuse, and at under $100 it is worth it’s weight in gold.
As a full time musician in the band Scary Cherry and the Bang Bangs, my TU-2, affectionately known as the Tutu, sees lots and lots of abuse, and just keeps working. We get crazy on stage with fake blood, people flailing around landing on stuff, beer being spilled, and even nitrous oxide shooting out of guitars, and I have learned many lessons about gear durability. But my TU-2 has never broken and I don’t think it will.

Before I bought my Boss tuner, I bought what I thought was the best available, foot switchable tuner for my pedalboard, a Peterson StroboStomp. The other guitar player in Scary Cherry and the Bang Bangs recommended I get a TU-2 as he had been using the same one for 10 years, but I wanted to buy the most expensive one I could. There is no doubt the Peterson is a good tuner, but the plastic jacks did not hold up very long. I would have mysterious breaks in my sound and I couldn’t figure out why. I finally figured out it was the fancy tuner. I took the pedal apart and the plastic jack was soldered onto the circuit board. In other words, it was going to be a pain to fix it if I could find the part.  Rather than fix it, I elected to retire the Peterson to studio recording only duty and get a Boss TU-2 for my pedalboard. I have not had one problem with it!

Boss TU-2 Specs:

• It runs on 9 volts.  You can either run it off a standard 9 volt battery, or a common 9 volt power supply.  It has two power jacks on the back of the unit.  One is for power input and one is power output, allowing you to run power to another 9 volt pedal.  This is great because you don’t have to use as many power out jacks on your power supply, which can quickly run low on a crowded pedalboard.
• Metal casing and pedal.  This is what makes it so rugged.  Some tuners use plastic pieces to activate the actual switch to turn the unit on and off.  Plastic breaks.  In the TU-2, only the switch itself is plastic and it is covered by a heavy duty chunk of metal which protects it.  The 9 volt battery is also housed under this section.
• Two output choices, output and bypass.  Most people like to mute their guitar signal when tuning.  The crowd at the club is there to hear good music, not that famous Chinese song Tu-Ning.  But if for some reason you want to signal to continue while the tuner is on, in the studio for example, you have an output for that as well.
• Easy to see in the dark.  It uses LEDs to let you know whether you are sharp or flat.  A green LED in the center of the pedal illuminates when you are in tune.  Red LED’s light up on the left if you are flat, and on the right if you are sharp.  An LED display also lights up and tells you what note you are playing.

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It also does a few fancy things like telling you how many cents off your pitch is as well as doing different modes rather than telling you the notes you are playing.  For instance, if you are in normal 6 string guitar mode, instead of displaying E,A,D,G,B, or E when you hit the corresponding string, it would display the string number 6,5,4,3,2 or 1.  Spiffy I guess, but if you don’t know the notes of the strings, you really should learn lol!

This blog has turned out longer than I thought it would be.  It just goes to show a lot can be said about this simple yet effective pedal.

To recap, the BOSS TU-2 is a long lasting, heavy duty work horse that can stand up on the most abusive pedal board and does a good job at helping you keep your guitar in tune.  Costing in the $100 range means it isn’t going to break your bank.

BossPedalGuy

If you would like to write a review of this pedal or any other Boss pedal and get a free plug and link for your band, website or whatever, please email us at bossguitarpedal @ netdonkey.com

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