Press the A pedal and your B strings become the third of an A chord. A chromatic tuner still wants them at 0.0¢. Steel Tuner knows which chord you are in, and re-aims all ten strings the moment your foot moves.
In development. Built with a working steel player, against published charts.
A pedal steel is a mechanical wonder. Press a pedal or push a knee lever and rods under the guitar retune several strings at once, so one open tuning becomes a dozen chords. Every number below is generated from the app's own model — the same code that drives the tuner, not a table typed out for a web page. Tap a pedal and watch what each string is being asked for.
Strings 1 and 7 on an E9 neck are both F♯, an octave apart. The Emmons Guitar Co. chart gives them +4¢ and −15¢. That is not a typo and it is not a compromise — he tuned one string to each role and plays whichever suits the chord.
Open, F♯ is E's major 2nd: 9:8, a shade sharp. Press B and C and the neck voices F♯ minor — now F♯ is the root, and for that minor third to be clean it has to sit a pure 6:5 below the A. Which puts it 10:9, flat.
Two readings, a syntonic comma apart, pulling in opposite directions off the same baseline. Exactly what players describe: too sharp in one chord, too flat in the other. There is no value that fixes it.
Jeff Newman went the other way. His chart puts both F♯s at +6¢ — 441.5 on a Hz tuner. He raises his E strings 10¢ to ride out cabinet drop, so measured from his own E that F♯ sits at −4¢: between the two readings, 8¢ flat of the pure 2nd and 14¢ sharp of the F♯-minor root. Neither chord gets a perfect F♯, but the two strings agree with each other, and the octave between them does not beat.
Emmons gives you the right F♯ if you reach for the right string. Newman gives you one F♯ that works everywhere. Neither is wrong — and Steel Tuner carries both charts, so you can hear the difference for yourself.
What Steel Tuner will not do is pretend there is one answer. It derives both targets, tells you the string is irreconcilable, and shows what each compromise costs — in beats per second, not cents, because that is what you actually hear.
| Reading | Interval | Cents |
|---|---|---|
| Open — E's 2nd | 9:8 | +3.91 |
| B+C — root of F♯m | 10:9 | −17.60 |
| Spread | syntonic comma | 21.51 |
Emmons' charted split was 19¢. The model derives 21.51¢ from first principles, having never seen his chart.
| Chart | String 1 | String 7 | From its E |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emmons | +4 | −15 | +4 / −15 |
| Newman | +6 | +6 | −4 / −4 |
Cents from equal temperament. Emmons leaves his E at 0; Newman raises his to +10, which is why his F♯ reads −4 against it.
Strings 1, 4 and 7. The other seven are solvable at the stop screw, and Steel prints the adjustment. Knowing which is which is the difference between an afternoon of work and an afternoon of chasing your tail.
Play an A and the C♯ above it. Both notes carry a harmonic near 550 Hz — the 5th of the A, the 4th of the C♯. When those two land on the same frequency the chord locks. When they miss, they beat, and the whole chord wobbles at the rate of the miss.
Equal temperament puts that third 13.7¢ sharp, which is 4.4 beats a second — fast enough to sound restless on a held chord. Drag it to zero and the envelope goes flat: the beating stops, because the two harmonics are now the same frequency. That is what a pedal steel player is listening for, and it is why Steel Tuner aims at ratios rather than at 0.0¢.
Each string's target is derived from the interval it is voicing in the context you are in — not from equal temperament, and not from a fixed offset table. Change the pedals, every target moves.
One Hz at 440 is 3.94¢. A whole-Hz tuner quantises to a grid that this instrument's two most important notes fall between — G♯ at −13.69¢ and B at +1.96¢ are simply not on it. That gap is why the paper chart exists.
Pedal A down, the B strings become C♯, 15.6¢ flat. Add the F lever and the E strings become the major third of that C♯ — inheriting its offset. Read plainly it is +11.7¢. Read as the chord it is actually playing, −29.3¢.
When a string is genuinely stuck, splitting the difference is the wrong move: a cent of error on a major third beats far harder than a cent on a seventh. Steel weights the compromise by how much each interval actually beats.
Values from the published Emmons and Newman charts are marked as charted. Everything filled in from ratios is flagged with a question mark. You are never shown an inference wearing the clothes of a chart.
There are "nearly infinite variations" and four charts from one forum thread disagreed three different ways. So every string, lever and half stop is editable — mid-tune, from the tuner screen, with the bar still in your hand.
Body flex under pedal tension is a property of your guitar, not of your temperament. Measure it once, keep it apart from the tuning, and when something sounds wrong you still have two variables instead of one.
A pluck arrives sharp and sweeps down. A single needle position cannot show that, so there are 2.5 seconds of pitch history on screen and a string only counts as tuned once it has settled.
The screen stays awake — ten strings takes longer than the timeout and your hands are on the bar. A phone call used to kill the mic silently; now it says so and comes back on its own.
A shared copedent is one file that is three things at once: a chart a person can read, a post you can paste into a forum, and a document that loads back into Steel Tuner exactly as you set it up — cascades, half stops and all.
Text it, mail it, paste it into a thread with a covering note and a signature wrapped around it. It still loads.
E9 10 strings · root E · Emmons pedals Open strings 1 F♯4 2 D♯4 3 G♯4 4 E4 5 B3 6 G♯3 7 F♯3 8 E3 9 D3 10 B2 Pedals Pedal A 5 B→C♯ 10 B→C♯ Pedal B 3 G♯→A 6 G♯→A Pedal C 4 E→F♯ 5 B→C♯ Franklin pedal 5 B→A 6 G♯→F♯ 10 B→A Knee levers F lever 4 E→F 8 E→F E♭ lever 4 E→D♯ 8 E→D♯ B♭ lever 5 B→A♯ 10 B→A♯ G lever 1 F♯→G 6 G♯→F♯ D lever half 2 D♯→D 9 D→C♯ full 2 D♯→C♯ 9 D→C♯
Presets are starting points, not standards — published charts disagree about which strings a lever moves, and sometimes about what the open strings even are. Each documented reading is kept whole rather than averaged.
On the universal, one lever lowers the E strings and the instrument becomes a B6 — so the tonal centre itself moves and every interval on that side is measured from B. Read against E instead, string 4's D♯ comes out 2¢ wrong and on the wrong side of the chord.
Steel is in development for iOS. If you play pedal steel and have a chart with real measured cents on it, that is the single most useful thing anyone can contribute.
charts@steeltuner.com — a photo of a marked-up chart is plenty. Questions go to support@steeltuner.com.