Online Instrument Tuner

A tuner for anything with a pitch

This is the chromatic tuner - it has no idea what instrument you are holding and does not need one. Play a note and it works out which of the twelve it is, which octave, and how far off you are in cents. That makes it the right tool for a mandolin, a banjo, a harp, a wind instrument, a synthesiser, or any string you are tuning to something unusual.

If you are tuning a guitar, bass, ukulele or violin, the dedicated tuners are better: they know the strings, so they can tell you which one you played and stop a badly flat string being reported as its neighbour.

What cents mean

A cent is one hundredth of a semitone, so an octave is 1200 of them. Around five cents is the point at which a difference stops being audible to most people, which is why that is the default tolerance here. Twenty cents is clearly wrong to a trained ear; fifty is a quarter tone and sounds obviously out.

Reference pitch

A4 = 440 Hz is the international standard and the correct default. Some orchestras tune to 442 or 443 by convention, and period ensembles often use 415 for baroque repertoire. Those are conventions, not improvements - no reference pitch is acoustically or scientifically superior to another, whatever you may read.

Getting a clean reading

Play one note, not a chord - the detector reports a single pitch and a chord gives it several. Let the note ring rather than damping it. Move away from fans and traffic if you can: the tuner will tell you the signal is unstable rather than guess, but a quiet room is easier for everyone.

Privacy

The microphone is opened only when you press start and released when you stop or leave the page. Audio is analysed as it arrives and discarded. Nothing is recorded and nothing is uploaded.

Related tools

Guitar tuner, bass tuner, tone generator, note frequency calculator.