Online tuner
Play a string; it names the note and shows how far out you are.
Turn on the microphone, play one note, and the tuner names it and shows how far out it is — in cents, the unit that actually tells you how much to turn the peg. It covers guitar, bass, ukulele, violin and cello, and it works chromatically, so you can point it at anything that holds a pitch. No microphone? Tap a string to hear it and tune by ear.
Nothing is recorded or uploaded — the sound is analysed in this tab, frame by frame, and thrown away. Play one note at a time: a tuner listens for a single pitch, so a strummed chord will read as nonsense. Tap a string to hear it and tune by ear instead.
How to get a good reading
- One note at a time. A tuner listens for a single pitch. Strum a chord and it will report something meaningless — that is the tool working correctly, not a bug.
- Let the note settle. The first instant of a pluck is mostly noise. Give it a moment and the needle will stop hunting.
- Get close and go quiet. Laptop microphones hear the room more than the instrument. Background music is fatal — it is a second pitch.
- Tune up to the note, never down to it. Coming up onto pitch keeps the string tight against the tuning peg, so it holds. If you overshoot, go below and come back up.
What is a cent?
A hundredth of a semitone. There are 1200 of them in an octave, which makes them a much better unit than hertz for talking about tuning: being 3 Hz flat means something quite different on a low E than on a high one, but 10 cents flat sounds equally out of tune anywhere. Under about 5 cents, nobody can hear the difference — which is why the needle counts that as in tune.
Why the reference pitch moves
A = 440 Hz is the modern standard, and it is only a convention. Plenty of orchestras tune sharper — 442 or 443 — for a brighter sound, and ensembles playing baroque music often drop to 415, almost a semitone below modern pitch. If you are playing along with a recording that was made at a different reference, turn the REF dial until the tuner agrees with the record rather than with the standard.
What happens to the sound
Nothing leaves your browser. The microphone feeds an analyser inside the page, each frame is measured for its period, and it is overwritten by the next one. There is no recording, no upload and no storage — the same approach the generator's listen-and-match uses, and it is described in full in the privacy note.
Once you're in tune
Find out what to play with the chord finder or the scale finder, keep time with the metronome, or bring the instrument to the Studio and record it alongside the synths.