A friend of mine contacted me on Facebook to ask what kind of power supply I use on my board, as he had recently purchased a pedal that did not take batteries. He was quite shocked when I told him that I use a T-Rex Fuel Tank Chameleon and he saw the price, as I think he was thinking of something around $30! You can't even get a One Spot for that here!
Anyway I was asking him about the pedal and he sends me a photo, and I see that it was a PolyTune Mini. I then mentioned that I have a regular PolyTune, and when he found out that it uses batteries he decided he wanted to swap, knowing that I could use the space on that end of my pedalboard. Anyway to cut a long story short we exchanged pedals yesterday and I tested it out tonight.
Like the other one it works a treat, and I had no problems tuning my bass with it tonight in exactly the same way I tuned it with the other pedal, i.e., using the chromatic mode while leaving the tuner in guitar mode and D standard polyphonic mode. Here though are a list of the features on the standard model that have been sacrificed to make a smaller unit.
1) No Display button. This means that there is no switching between 'needle' and that other horrible display for chromatic tuning (it's needle only, which suits me), and no bass mode for polyphonic display (I never bothered to use that anyway, I always leave it in guitar mode and D standard for my guitars in the band; I might however buy a regular unit if I ever build a separate effects board for bass only). So basically the two display modes are needle chromatic and six-string guitar polyphonic.
2) There is no USB port. This means that you can't upgrade the firmware using a USB cable. I never did this on the old unit and I don't know when I would have, although it might have been good if people had really early versions and wanted to upgrade the firmware for the drop tuning mode (the drop mode is included with the mini, btw).
3) There is no 9V out. This is the only one that affected me, as I relied on that, but for the moment I've removed one pedal (the MXR M-80 DI box for bass) from my board until a new daisy chain arrives from China.
4) There is no facility for changing the pitch, which is set at A440Hz. I have no idea why you would change it. Perhaps I am a philistine but I expect that few people are going to miss that feature.
So, no real loss for me except for the size of the unit.
Here are a couple of before and after photos showing the size difference. The smaller pedal gives me more room so that I can access the boost switch on the right side of my wah pedal with my toe.
