Tuner

A tuner does not change the sound at all — its whole job is silence: read the string’s pitch and either display it or, on a tuner with a mute output, cut the signal so the check happens without anyone hearing it. Everything downstream of a tuner is irrelevant to what it needs to see; everything upstream of it is exactly what it depends on. Gain, filtering, modulation and detuning effects can all confuse a pitch-tracking algorithm, and a tuner fed the wrong signal reports the wrong pitch confidently, which is worse for a player mid-song than not checking at all.

The types in this family

• Tuner (rank 10): A tuner reads the strongest, least-processed signal, so it goes first; a tuner with a mute output doubles as the chain’s silent-tuning switch.

Where it sits in the chain, and why

This is why a tuner sits first on almost every board built for it. It reads the string at full strength before a buffer reshapes the impedance, before a compressor levels it, and long before anything with gain or modulation gets a chance to blur the fundamental it is trying to lock onto. A tuner placed after a fuzz or an octave pedal is trying to track a signal that may not carry a clean fundamental at all, and its readout becomes unreliable exactly when a player trusts it most — which is why the chain planner on this site places it first without exception.

Power notes

Most stand-alone tuner pedals are simple, low-current devices — the display is the only real load, and there is no signal processing to speak of. That makes a tuner an easy pedal to daisy-chain with almost anything else on a shared, non-isolated output. This is a general pattern, not a specification for any individual model: always confirm voltage, polarity and draw from the pedal’s own documentation before wiring it into a board.

General guidance for the family, never a specification for any individual pedal — always confirm voltage, polarity, current draw and isolation from the maker’s own documentation before wiring a real board.

Every rank and reason above is quoted straight from pedal-chain-planner.js's PEDAL_TYPES — the same taxonomy this site's chain planner runs and docs/gearwarrior-pedals-contract.md documents. No second table.