Hey guys. I’m just starting to play the bass. I also play the guitar and generally use an app on my phone for tuning it. I was wanting to know if it was possible to use a phone tuner or would I need to purchase a separate tuner for a bass? Also, do we need to connect the bass to an amp while tuning or can we tune without an amp?
Apologies if any of these questions are a bit silly 
Not silly at all. Phone tuners will work and are infinitely better than no tuner, but you will probably eventually want a dedicated tuner.
Ok. Thank you!
Neither phones nor my condenser mic with an online tuner works for bass.
The low frequences of the open E and A string are often times not even picked up by those tuners.
Of course there are workarounds to it, but i would not recommend those for beginners.
This, however, is true.
I still would recommend to buy a tuner as soon as possible, because you are making the tuning process more complicated and time consuming than it has to be compared to a real tuner - especially for a beginner in my opinion.
If your phone tuner cannot pick up the E or A string well, you can still tune the D/G strings to the phone and then tune down by fifths by ear, which is how everyone used to tune before cheap tuners were available. And it works fine, but is tedious.
As I said, you can get by with a phone and it’s way better than nothing. But you’ll want a real, dedicated tuner.
also remember that unless it’s just you in your bedroom, nobody wants to stand around waiting for the bass player to tune his bass. you can get a clip on tuner pretty cheap and if you like just leave it attached to your bass, i have a tc electronic clip that josh recommended that works well. i also coincidentally was just looking at the ehx 2020 tuning pedal which is small and cheap.
My phone tuner picks up my E string fine, although sometimes it flickers over to the B overtone.
Maybe silly question but didn’t want to open a new topic for it - if this is considering necroing, I am sorry - mods feel free to scold 
Uhm I wanted to start taking my bass with me to practice more or have fun when I am away from home. So I wanted to buy a Voxamp2 and I was very buffled as to how will i be able to tune my bass without an external speaker. I’ve found that maybe a pedal tuner could work but I found only one that needs external sourse of power and in my case I’d prefer batteries?
What you guys do when you are away for 3 or more days but can’t take the cabinet with you?
I am using free version of GuitarTuna app on iPhone and have no issues. Most of times I use tuner in my DAW, but the app is also good enough and does the job.
I use the BlueCat Hot Tuna plugin but I also have 2 electronic tuners.
I like the my new vibration tuner more than I like my old electric one. When I assemble a pedal I will just start it with a tuner pedal.
Clip on tuner. TC unitune is a good one.
Personally, having owned a couple, I’d stay away from Snark.
clip on with a jack? Will it get the sound of a non-amped instrument?
clip-on tuners just clip onto the headstock and work via vibration, not pickup sound.
Agreed 100%
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I had one of these and it was fine.
Like @howard said, they’re small, clip-on to the headstock and detect the vibrations that way - no amplification needed. Good ones are very accurate too.
If you want to buy a Tuner I would definitely suggest Kork TM60 instead of the clip on which is super precise and it works also by either directly connecting your bass and / or through its micrphone. It works with any instrument that way practically.
If you don’t want to spend on it now you can connect your Amplug Headphone output to your PC’s microphone input (if there is) and use this website
i use a clip on tc for my u-bass. very fast and accurate, i don’t even bother to remove it anymore, it just lives on my headstock. maybe because you have to tune ubass’s every 6 seconds.
Thank you all very much for the suggestions!
I didn’t know that clip ons can detect the vibrations without an amp and for sure didn’t know about what to avoid etc, didn’t know I can even tune with Voxamp into my phone lol
Thank you everyone. <3
Clip-on tuners work very well, and can be used with or without an amp, but may not be quite accurate enough for adjusting intonation, @NocturnalPulse 
Like everything else . . . YMMV
Cheers
Joe