What did you use before electronic tuners?

Old school phone dial tone is A440. So if everyone wanted to be exactly in concert pitch, we'd use the phone.
 
I used to have an electric tuner, but it got lost of broken, so then it was the horrible A 440 from my metronome OR tuned to match the recording I was practicing with or learning (as many albums are not at A 440 or Eb).

Oh yeah, and whatever keyboard might have been handy.
 
I didn't use anything until I had a tuner. I just tuned the low E to what I thought E was and tuned the rest of the strings to that. I think my ear is flat. Whenever I do that now and check it against a tuner, I am always at Eb.
 
I had a tuning fork but I was never much good with ear alone. I got one of these early on:

tuner.jpg
 
Steve Hillage's "L" album opens with the whole band laying into a giant crashing E power chord on the tune "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and they let it sustain out long enough until it's just the keyboards rippling as the chord dies out. It's long enough so that I was always able to tune against it.

Weirdly, I did that so many times that if I think of that song's opening I can hear it in my head, I don't need the record anymore.
 
I tuned to various songs where there was a pronounced A or E, then tuned the other strings accordingly.

I have used the dial tone trick as well (as other have pointed out, the US dialtone is two tones of 350 and 440 hertz). It is reasonably easy to tune the A string to it.

I designed and built an oddish tuner in 1982. I started off trying to design an oscilloscope using a 16 by 16 array of discrete LEDs. I quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to be practical, but as I was playing with ideas on how to mux the LEDs together to cut down on parts count, the notion of only having one row of LEDs came to me would let me at least get an idea of what a waveform was doing, and from there I realized this would make an awesome guitar tuner. The end product ended up working pretty well - imagine a linear version of a Conn Strobotuner (got me an A in my engineering design class). Unfortunately, as a poor college student, I used a surplus mechanical resonator as a clock source instead of a quartz crystal circuit so the absolute frequency stability wasn't good. I kept it for years with the intention of building a better clock source, but I ended up getting an actual Strobotuner for free, and I junked the homemade tuner.

I still use the Strobotuner, BTW.
 
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Help!I'maRock! said:
He was just another in a long line of people who tried to get A=440 established as the standard. Funny that it didn't actually happen until electronic tuners.
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Hakiu from me to you,

Don't try and make this
About "facts" and "history"
you are a Nazi
 
I can't remember not having an electronic tuner.

That said, when I took classical guitar lessons as a child, my teacher used a tuning fork.
 
Bought an electronic tuner when I bought my first guitar in the early 2000s.

In school we'd use an electronic tuner when warming up and then all tune to a reference note at concert pitch for band.
 
I have to say that in ye olden time I spent much more time just tuning my guitar 'internally' so all the strings are in relative tune to one another, and not tuned to any external reference. Even when jamming to people we would just quickly tune to the bass, which wasn't tuned to any specific frequency.
 
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