TTuner

Graham St-Laurent

About this app

TTuner is a Temperament Tuner. It's a Tone tuner. It's a Timbre Tuner. In other words, it plays a tone of any of your customizable timbres in any of your customizable temperaments. You select which tone and then you can tune to it. So, to be clear, this is NOT the kind of tuner that listens to you and tells you if you're sharp or flat; but it provides a nice drone that you can make sound as agreeable or as hideous as you'd like, depending on what you find most effective. In other words, it's a digital tuning fork. It defaults to pitches based on A = 415Hz, but that is totally customizable too.

The thing that makes TTuner most unique is its temperament system. Most customizable-temperament tuners nowadays let you input the temperament as a series of deviations from equal temperament. This one allows for that too, but it also provides another method that's more historically accurate, and - simply - more meaningful: a series of deviations from pure intervals specified in units of fractions of pythagorean or syntonic commas. That's the way all the historical temperaments were designed and it's probably how any olden-days musician conceived of the different temperaments. With the proliferation of digital tuners these days, this way of thinking about different tuning systems is relatively unknown, but TTuner is a great way to explore it! Another advantage is that, because TTuner is not confined to deviations from equal temperament, you have more notes at your disposal. You can have D-sharp AND E-flat. Hey - why not have a B-sharp too? Or even - dare I say it? - F-double-sharp. (You're probably dealing with your own modern-day custom temperament if you end up in lots of situations like that). Or maybe you only want a scale with A, E and C in it: well, define a temperament with just relationships for just those notes; no others will exist! So TTuner gives you lots of control.

The interface is pretty straightforward. And there's a built-in set of help screens to explain all the details. Comes with 5 pre-configured timbres (Waveforms) and the following 13 pre-configured tuning systems:

Equal Temperament
Just Intonation
Kirnberger III
Lehman-Bach
Meantone, 1/4 Comma
Meantone, 1/5 Comma
Meantone, 1/6 Comma
Pythagorean
Sorge 1758
Valotti
Werckmeister III
Woods So Wild
Young II


Enjoy!

Ratings and reviews

Excellent drone app! I use TTuner nearly every day. While I have a few minor gripes that I'll eventually get around to submitting bug reports or feature requests about, it's lightweight, works very well, and has a reasonably intuitive interface.

This app makes wonderful drones which are filled with overtones. That means you don't loose the pitch once you're in tune with the fundamental (unlike with a sine wave generator). I use this every time I practice! Thank you so much!

Awesome, awesome, AWESOME. Sound and pitch in any octave at a reference pitch level of your choice. Some overtones blended in for easier tuning. Can NOT love this app more. So great for intonation practice.