An organ lover in postwar Chicago.

Peterson’s tuners began as a side line of a pipe-organ obsession. The company, Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Inc., dates its story to 1948: both its tuner website and its organ website say “Since 1948,” and the tuner site calls its products “the world’s most accurate tuners for more than 75 years.” A company history from 2002, signed by the president, Scott R. Peterson, describes his father, Richard H. Peterson, as a Chicago-born organ enthusiast who served as a US Army radio operator at the end of the Second World War and decided that his life’s work would be finding better ways to build organs.

In 1948 he became a partner in the Haygren Organ Company of Chicago, which, the company says, built about fifty electronic church organs through 1953, the early ones in an unused part of his father’s coal yard. In the early 1950s a licensing deal with the Gulbransen piano company of Chicago put his designs into home electronic organs, and the company says he developed the world’s first transistor organ, which Gulbransen brought to market in 1957; NAMM’s oral-history archive repeats that claim. The 2002 history also says he met Don Leslie, the inventor of the Leslie speaker, in 1951, and that the two became friends and informal partners on organ inventions, including an organ effect that became known as the “wah-wah” pedal. We give that as the company’s account.

The tuners grew out of the organ work. According to the company, the first devices to carry the Peterson Electro-Musical Products name were electronic tuners modelled on one Richard Peterson had built for tuning organs. Its 2002 history names the Model 150 and Model 200 of the early to mid 1950s and the Model 70 of the early 1960s, which it calls the first commercially available hand-held battery tuner. NAMM’s summary of a 2013 interview with Scott Peterson dates the first tuner to 1952, “beginning with Model 70,” and the hand-held tuner to 1964, so the sources differ on dates. In 1964 the company moved into a new 3,000-square-foot building on 2.5 acres in Alsip, a suburb southwest of Chicago, where it remains.

The pattern that stands still.

A strobe tuner shows a moving pattern that drifts one way when a note is sharp, the other way when it is flat, and stands still when it is in tune. Peterson is the name most associated with the type: English Wikipedia calls it “the best-known brand in strobe tuner technology.” The dates differ slightly. The company’s 2002 history says it introduced its first strobe tuner in 1968; Wikipedia dates its first, the Model 400, to 1967. NAMM’s interview summary says the strobe tuner became an important tool for recording engineers and musicians from the late 1960s.

The best-known Peterson units were mechanical, with spinning discs behind a window. The largest, the Strobe Center, has twelve separate strobe displays, one for each note of the octave; Wikipedia puts its price at about US$3,500 and says it is used for jobs such as tuning bells. In the mid to late 1990s the company brought in microprocessor-controlled models with stepper motors and automatic note selection, the AutoStrobe line and the Strobe Center-5000. In January 2001 it introduced the VS-1 Virtual Strobe, which, the company says, put a real-time strobe display into a small battery-powered unit, and screen-based strobes now make up most of the range.

The work was not only tuners. The company says it designed and built preamps for Fender Rhodes electric pianos in the late 1970s, renting space to CBS/Fender in a building at Alsip, and that Richard Peterson and the engineer Bill Hass added the Rhodes “ping pong” stereo tremolo. From the late 1960s much of the firm turned to pipe-organ controls, including switching systems, combination actions and swell-shade operators, which it still sells.

Today’s tuner range runs from the mechanical AutoStrobe 490, 490-ST and 590 and the twelve-wheel SC-5000 II to the StroboStomp HD and Mini and the new StroboVUE pedal tuners, the StroboClip HD, HDC and HDC-V clip-ons, the StroboPLUS HDC bench tuner, the StroboSoft desktop software, iStroboSoft for iOS and Strobe for Android, plus BodyBeat metronomes. Its “Sweetened Tunings,” presets that offset the tuning of particular instruments, are trademarks, and the AutoStrobe 490 page claims accuracy to 0.1 cent, a thousandth of a semitone.

Design and documentation.

The seven makers in this guide each hold one corner of the guitar-accessory trade — straps, capos, tuners or picks — and most are still tied to a founder or a founding family.

Levy’s, which makes straps, was founded in 1973 by Dennis Levy, its 2009 website said, describing factories in Winnipeg and in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In January 2019 Gator Co., the Tampa case maker, said it had acquired Levy’s the year before, and Levy’s now gives a Tampa address.

Three make capos. Shubb was formed in California in 1974 by Rick Shubb and Dave Coontz; Rick Shubb’s own history says a dedicated shop in Qingdao, China, was making about 80% of its capos by 2016, the year its founding partnership ended. Kyser says the machinist Milton Kyser had incorporated it in Texas by 1980, and that it makes its capos in Kaufman, Texas, under his great-niece Meredith McClung-Attebery. Paige, begun by Bryan Paige and his father Ralph in Michigan, says it now operates only from Erwin, Tennessee.

Two make tuners. Peterson Electro-Musical Products, founded by the inventor Richard H. Peterson, has been based in Alsip, outside Chicago, since 1964, its history says. Snark says it launched in 2010; in 2013 its warranty address was Evets Corporation’s, in Camarillo, California; English Wikipedia names Evets as the owner of Danelectro. Gravity Picks, the youngest, says it began in early 2011 and makes its acrylic picks in California.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Family-owned in Alsip.

Peterson has not changed hands in the sources we checked. The company’s organ website says Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Inc. “is entirely owned by the Peterson family” and that profits are reinvested in the business. Scott R. Peterson became president in 1990, after working as a design engineer, production manager and vice president, the 2002 history says; NAMM interviewed him as president in January 2013, and the company’s staff directory still lists him in that role. The same site says pipe-organ products make up about 60 percent of sales, with nearly all the rest coming from the tuner division, and that about 35 people work at its multi-building site in Alsip, with about 20 more at a partner’s facility near Hoopeston, Illinois, making selected circuit boards and electro-mechanical parts. Those figures are undated, so we give them as the company’s own.

On where things are made, the company is specific about its mechanical tuners. The AutoStrobe 490 and SC5000-II pages carry a “Made in the USA” badge, and the AutoStrobe page says the tuner is “proudly designed, manufactured, and tested in Alsip, IL U.S.A.” We did not find a similar statement on the pages for its clip-on and pedal tuners, so we make no claim about where those are built. We found no design awards in the sources checked.

One detail matters for a design guide. Among its trademarks the company lists “the linear & concentric strobe patterns,” alongside the Strobo family of product names, so the moving bands on its displays are treated as part of the brand, not just the interface.

For a design guide, Peterson shows how a working display can become a brand’s signature. Compare TC Electronic, which Wikipedia lists among makers of LED strobe tuners, and Snark, the low-cost clip-on brand. For this guide we use black, amber and steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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