Boss TU-30 Tuner

[FretRiff]

Hey, semantics means meaning. You said you loosen them "a lot... until they're really loose" and only now you're saying "slightly loose." Hard to know what you mean or what you do when you have stated every type of looseness there is.

The point remains: frequent loosening beyond making small intonation adjustments with strings at normal playing tension or just slightly loosened can cause premature wear on the strings. And excessive cycles of "really loose" loosening and retightening can result in kinks, flat spots or micro-cracks in the windings, especially near tuning posts and saddles - which can result in dead spots or even broken strings. And that's on top of elasticity loss from fatigue in the metal core/winding.

 

[Chillgaze_Jun]

Id advice to master tuning up into the ballpark quickly by ear and just use a decent accurate tuner to measure the precision of your intonation adjustments. Theres no reason to rely on a obscure and IMO needless feature like this. Get one string in tune by ear and use the 5th and 7th fretted positions as a guide for your other strings as you bring them up to pitch. On a side note a single flatwound D string can have upwards of 50 pounds of tension at standard tuning pitch. Thats an anbsurd amount of friction gouging down on a bridge plate, a spring and tiny screws. Dont pay any mind to those whom would subject their instrument to such abuse, its absolutely less damaging to the instrument to ease off the tension on the strings before making adjustements. I also find it silly how some will take no issue slapping, popping, and double thumping with reckless abandon mangling the daylights out of both string windings and frets, yet simply slackning the strings some is seen akin to a sinful taboo. It makes no sense to me at all.

 

[HueyFreeman]

Boss TU-3 sucks for intonating. I'd also posit that any cheap tuner would suck as well.

 

[bronislas]

It might not be the answer you need or you want, but I got a Boss TU-80 with my first bass in 2004. It fell on the floor thousands of time, my three daughters played with it, spilled water on it,threw it like a ball, I stomped on it... It got mistreated more than any other object in my house. I have other tuners, some are much more expensive and are said to be much more precise but because I can't be bothered with another pedal on my pedalboard, I use it 99% of the time, on a daily basis, and... I'm perfectly happy with the intonation I get on any 4,5 or 6 string bass or any guitar. I even use it to fine tune my analog synths or to tune my Dulcie (a small 4 string guitar with piezo pickups). The only thing that could possibly break it would be a Nokia 3310.