Keith Tuners

Keith tuners, sometimes known as Keith D-tuners, are a type of banjo tuner that enables moving between two preset tuning pitches.  They were invented by bluegrass banjoist Bill Keith in the early 1960s, and are still made by the company he founded in Woodstock, New York.  The tuners are beautifully made of stainless steel with a very high level of workmanship and precision.

I discovered these when I was a kid back in the late 1970s, as the banjoist in my father's band used them on his Gibson Mastertone RB-250 banjo.  I was immediately intrigued with them.  A few months ago, the thought of them recurred to me, and I knew I'd want to try them on one of my instruments.

The magical thing about the Keith tuners is that you can preset them for two different pitches; it can be any two pitches.  In other words, I might want to change my high E to a C# or D# tuning.  I can set the tuner for those two pitches, and then move between them instantly by turning the tuner key about 1/4 turn.  There are set stops in the tuner, so I can't go past them; each stop is perfectly in tune.  Now I can instantly change tunings in a performance situation.  Prior to the Keith tuners, that was a hard impossibility.

In the following photo, the two small silver and black dials on the side of the Keith tuners control the tuning presets; they're also visible in the photo at the top of this page.  

24-string Double Sub-contraguitar - tuner configuration

Here's a demo video so you can hear them in action.  This video also provides some background on how they work.

I recently installed four of those on the 24-string Double Subcontraguitar on the octave strings on  courses 1 and 2 on both necks.  That means that this instrument has the possibility of eight (8) different tunings all at once, without changing strings or doing anything extra, other than setting each Keith tuner with the two pitches that I want.  I can change the two pitches to be anything; in other words, after I set them, for example, E and D, if later I want to change that to F and D#, it's easy to do.  The tuners have a range of a major third, so that provides quite a lot of flexibility.  I have literally dozens of tunings I've devised, so being able to access multiple tunings on a single instrument feels like discovering a new planet.  

On the 24-string Double Sub-contraguitar, I've added six Keith tuners, which provides up to 12 different tunings at once.  You'll be hearing this on some upcoming album projects.  It's also possible that I'll add a pair to the 30-string Double Contraguitar.

If you're a guitarist using different tunings, I recommend you check out the Keith tuners.  

My sincere thanks to Martin Keith (Bill's son) at Beacon Banjo for all his help and support.

Update: since this blog post was written, I've added a part 2 which you can read here.

-kk