Price: £14.99 Contact: JHS, 0113 286 5381, www.jhs.co.uk

It generally takes quite a lot these days to stand out from the crowd when it comes to clip-on tuners such as these, but the Snark SN-1 certainly catches your attention with its colour LCD readout. Expectations are high as the tuner recently won the prestigious MMR Dealers’ Choice Award, so it’s clear that this is obviously a well thought-out piece of kit.

For your money the Snark comes with a couple of very handy extra features. The first of which is a tap tempo metronome, which takes the form of a heart icon that flashes on the screen of the tuner. Whilst an audio option would have been ideal, this is still a very welcome addition and something we wish was included on more clip-on tuners. The other really interesting feature on this tuner is the capo compensating “flat” tuning, where you can compensate for a capo being placed from the first to the fourth frets. The tuner will then adjust its readout so that you are effectively tuning in concert pitch (i.e. the tuner will read E rather than F if you have a capo on the first fret). This is a great feature and from our testing so far seems to be extremely accurate, with no problems once we removed our capo from the test guitar.

These features aside, the actual tuning performance of the Snark is fantastic, probably one of the best clip-on tuners we’ve ever tried, in fact. The readout is very clear and easy to read, and the tuning sensitivity was far above expectations with every stringed instrument we had to hand. Importantly, all of the tuner’s extra features were very quick and intuitive to use, always a huge plus when it comes to tuners. At this price the Snark is in line with most other clip-on tuners out there, and in our opinion offers superb value for money.