Pack it up folks, nubinetwork has exposed the scam that is the guitar tuner industry. You don’t need a guitar tuner if you have ears; all the guitar techs and musicians who use them have bought into a lie. And obviously since guitar tuners are a waste of time, a tech demo showing that you can use the accelerometer in a commodity handheld device to pick up minute vibrations with sufficient accuracy to detect guitar tuning from a web page is just feeding into the hands of Big Tuner.

Seriously, this is the very definition of a shallow dismissal.

If you have a good external reference point. But it's also pretty easy to have your tuning drift quite a bit away from E standard if you solely rely on the strings. Getting a standard tuning is not the same as getting the standard tuning you want, exactly. This is especially true if you play in standard tunings below E, like C or B, where strings can be looser than the norm.

Pro guitar teacher here with over twenty years of experience teaching the guitar, and close to fourty years of experience playing the guitar. I still struggle with properly tuning my instrument by ear. Nothing wrong with my ears. It's just not easy to do this right.

So what do you do when the lead singer is engaging in some stage banter and you need to tune between songs? IEMs? With what reference pitch?

It's not hard if E is in tune already. :)

I can tell if my guitar's significantly out of tune, but no way I'm getting an accurate tune without a tuner.

i'm like this at home for sure, until i want to play along to something in tune.

i'm also the one at rehearsal literally throwing TU-3s at my bandmates who don't have tuners on their boards for some reason. you have to have a tuner if you play with others. no question.