Playing your guitar offers an escape from the world, a chance to focus on music and enjoy time with your favorite instrument. However, tuning your guitar can be a real nuisance, especially for beginners, and can hold you back from playing.
Fortunately, there are apps that exist to assist you with tuning your guitar. These apps will make it easier for you and ensure you can get to playing as quickly as possible!
1. Fender Tune Digital
Fender Tune Digital is a sleek and useful app that allows you to tune your guitar with ease, whether that's electric, acoustic, bass, or ukulele.
The app is free for auto and manual tuning of the above instruments, and creating an account gives you access to a Pro Tuner feature, over 5000 chord diagrams, over 2000 scale patterns, metronome and drum tracks, as well as allowing you to save custom tunings.
The Auto Tuner will wait to hear what notes you play on your instrument, telling you whether the note needs to be tuned up or down, if at all. The Manual Tuner allows you to play strings on the app, then play the same string on your instrument to gauge by ear how tuned your instrument is.
This difference in approach to tuning between auto and manual gives you full control and ensures the app fits musicians of any skill level.
The app features eight quick videos to help you tune, and features Ukulele Tune Tips, Intermediate Tips, and tips on Using Fender Tune. Finally, on the Fender Play tab, there are thousands of easy-to-follow lessons to help you learn how to play the guitar.
2. GuitarTuna
GuitarTuna allows you dozens of tuning options across a wide variety of instruments. It has plenty of options for adjustments and fits musicians of varying skill levels.
Its Tuner tab allows you to either autotune, by playing strings on your instrument that the app will pick up, or manually tune by playing strings on the app and using your ear to match your instrument to it until it's tuned correctly. You can choose which type of instrument you're using as well as the number of strings on it.
The app features a metronome so you can train your accuracy and speed, and a chord library that features a collection of guitar and ukulele chords as well as their variations.
The Games tab is filled with activities that aid you in learning chords, chord diagrams, and chord ear trainers.
The Settings are very capable, allowing you to switch to left-handed mode, disable "in tune" SFX, and calibrate to a specific hertz threshold.
Lastly, GuitarTuna's Yousician and Songs tabs take you to download Yousician, its parent app which features thousands of songs, tracks your practice progress, and allows you to compete for high scores against other musicians using the app.
Using apps such as this as well as an app to help you learn to play guitar can be a great way to pick up the instrument quickly, teaching you good playing habits as well as how to intuitively tune so that eventually you don't need an app.
3. Guitar Tuner Easy
Guitar Tuner Easy features tuning for guitars, bass, and ukulele, alongside offering help with chords, and it even allows you to jam alongside looped instrumentals.
When using the Tuner tab, you can play open strings using your instrument, which the app will then advise whether to tune or down, or whether the note is okay. You can also manually input strings via the app, and use your ear to aid in tuning your instrument.
Its Chords tab works much the same way, allowing you to auto-tune or manually tune using the app as a guide.
The Jam tab features loops across various genres (Rock, Pop, Folk, etc) as well as displaying the BPM and key that the loop is in. This can be a great way for you to practice your guitar, bass, or ukulele skills, and is completely free from the offset.
Its premium model, CoachTuner Gold, offers a visual chords dictionary, no ads, and alternate tunings.
4. Guitar Tuner - Ukulele & Bass
Guitar Tuner - Ukulele & Bass, by Gismart, puts the focus on educating musicians, helping you to tune your instruments to perfection and focus on actually playing and improving.
Like the other apps featured, this app has a Tuner tab that can be used as a manual tuner or an auto-tuner. It also features a Chromatic Tuner tab, which helps by displaying the pitch of the notes played.
Its Games tab offers guitar games, a metronome, and chord learning activities to take your playing skills to the next level.
You can also adjust the settings via the Guitars tab, selecting which type of tuning you'd like. For example, standard, drop D, A to A (baritone), and so on.
The app begins with a three-day trial, that then turns into the premium model which can be canceled at any time.
5. Pro Tuner
Pro Tuner by Karaoke Music Coach App allows tuning for stringed instruments, such as the guitar, ukulele, violin, viola, and cello.
Interestingly, this app offers functionality with Apple Watch as well as iPhone, detecting your tuning notes, generating tones, and giving precise frequencies detection measured in hertz.
It has the simplest interface of all the apps covered, solely featuring the chromatic tuner for the instruments listed above. Like with the other apps, you can auto-tune by playing strings from your instruments that the app picks up via your microphone or you can manually input the strings on the app and use your ear to match it on your instrument.
Pro Tuner is free at the time of writing, but has made it clear that this is only for a limited time. It currently offers an upgrade to remove ads from the app completely.
Tune In Next Week
These apps will make tuning your stringed instruments much less of a hassle, allowing you to focus on playing and improving. Whether you're a beginner musician, coming back from a break, or just hate tuning, then these apps are bound to help you.
And if you'd like to make music but are missing instruments such as a drumkit or a bass, you can use music-making apps for your iPhone and iPad.