Best Cheapest Hand Held Tuner?

[Nimitz]

If one session were "ghetto tuned", then that might make sense. But it would take special effort to intentionally tune like that on a repeated basis.

Not the session itself... a dude at the clinic asked Dime about his tuning, but Dime's answer was like he really didn't want to say how he tunes his guitars. Just some quick BS.

I'm sure the amazing metal guitar masterpieces that Dime and the Cowboys gave us, they were holding all the Aces!!!

[Chad]

Thinking out loud...

If Pantera had played primarily one tuning most of the time, then maybe it could have been that he preferred the tone of two different tunings and couldn't decide which to go with so he went somewhere in the middle. But considering the amount of different tunings they used, that argument doesn't really hold up.

I'd guess he did it to add some mystique to the recordings to get guitar players scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on. Today it's relatively easy to find a tuner that can compensate for the offset, but back then there were probably only a handful of tuners that would do that. I think he used Korg rack tuners.