Building a cheap tuner into a pedal

[whatdoudo]

Greetings. While organizing my work area yesterday, I came across a box of about a dozen cheap electronic tuners. I picked them up almost by accident over the years-- I'm sure you all know how it goes-- one was left in a chipboard case  with an old Harmony I picked up at a yard sale; another came with a Squier that I upgraded/modded and reliced for a customer; etc. I figured I'd try to build some into pedals. Have any of you talented tinkerers done this? My plan is to basically use an A/B box design with the A out going to the amp and B output to the tuner. The footswitch be wired to the tuner's on/off buttin gving me silent tuning when stomped. The tuners are in various configurations: everything from bare bones guitar/bass tuners with a mic, input jack and no output to chromatic tuners with input and output jack; etc. Any advice or ideas? By the way: please don't bother replying by telling me about the tone-sucking nature of tuners. Heh!  I'm well aware. Just looking to get some use out of a bunch of tuners that would otherwise be collecting dust.

[armdnrdy]

Any advice or ideas?

HHHMMM....Let me see...A project for a box full of tuners.  

I got it!  

Why don't you make a tuner pet?  




Or perhaps a Tuner Fish.

[bluebunny]

Why don't you make a tuner pet?  

Ba-dum, tish!             Nice one, Larry.   

[merlinb]

Have any of you talented tinkerers done this?

I did it once, for a bit of fun. I added a buffer since I wasn't sure of the tuner's characteristics, and I didn't want it loading down the guitar signal when not being used. In retrospect, this was overkill; I could have just used a 3PDT to disconnect the tuner. Since the tuner switches itself off after a while to conserve its (original) batteries, I couldn't leave it running continuously, so the footswitch also powers it on each time.
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=93348.0

[mremic01]

Have you guys found that loading from the tuner is significant enough to impact tone? I've built a few buffered tuner-outs based off recommendations to do so, but having a tuner in parallel with my pickups hasn't seem to had any perceptible effect on my tone. At least not for any of the tuners I own. Even a switch to disconnect it seems like it might not be necessary.

[vigilante397]

Larry's Tuner Pet made my day.