About

About TuneStrings

TuneStrings is a small, independent tuning site for people who like to use their ears.

The idea is very simple: choose an instrument, play a reference tone and tune until things stop sounding slightly wrong.

No microphone permission. No bouncing needle. No app asking you to create an account before you can tune one string.

Why tune by ear?

Because your ears are actually quite good at this.

You do not need perfect pitch. Very few people have it, and it is not required here anyway. What matters is being able to hear whether your note is a little higher, a little lower, or getting closer to the reference.

Do that often enough and something useful happens: you get better at hearing pitch in general.

Tuning becomes faster, intervals become easier to recognise and that annoying feeling of “something is slightly off” starts becoming much easier to solve.

Built around real instruments

TuneStrings includes guitars, basses, violin-family instruments, ukuleles, banjos, mandolins, balalaikas, lutes and a growing collection of other string instruments.

Some of them are wonderfully straightforward. Others have doubled courses, drone strings, re-entrant tuning, cross tuning, historical tunings or enough strings to make you briefly question your life choices.

That is part of the fun.

About the sound

The reference tones are generated directly in your browser.

I have tried to make them clear rather than pretty. They are designed to give you a stable pitch that is easy to compare with your instrument.

Low bass notes are a special problem because phones and laptops are not very interested in reproducing 40 Hz. So the lowest tones contain carefully controlled harmonics that make the pitch easier to hear on small speakers without changing the note itself.

If you are tuning something seriously low, headphones or proper speakers will still win.

Keep it simple

I like tools that open quickly and do the thing you came for.

So TuneStrings has no account, no installation and no setup wizard. Open the tuner, choose your instrument and start tuning.

That is really the whole idea.

Made in Sweden

TuneStrings is an independent website made and maintained in Sweden.

It has been online in one form or another for many years, and I am still improving it whenever I find something that can be clearer, faster or simply nicer to use.

If TuneStrings helps you get an instrument in tune a little faster — or helps your ears get a little better along the way — then it is doing exactly what it was made for.