March 18, 2013

gStrings Free Tuner for Android phones

I recently purchased an Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S3, and have been amazed at the catalog of applications available. One that caught my eye as a musician is the gStrings Free Tuner. Below is a review from MakeUseOf.com.




chromatic tuner

If you’re a musician of any kind, you’ve no doubt thought about getting some kind of pitch-giving app on your smartphone. For Android users, there are lots of different apps to choose from. However, whatever your instrument (but especially for guitarists), you should really consider using gStrings Free Tuner.
The gStrings Free Tuner app is tiny, free and yet packed with features that will leave you with no need for any other tuning or pitch-checking application. We’ve got it listed as one of the Best Android Apps under Audio, but it’s about time we really showed you what it’s all about.

chromatic tuner

The Basics Of gStrings Free Chromatic Tuner

At first glance, you can easily see that gStrings offers most of what the average musician needs in a tuning app. You can pick any note in a chromatic scale, play that note in the app to tune from or get the app to listen to your instrument playing it and show you how close you are to the right note.

chromatic tuners


The display shows the note you’re aiming for in the centre of a swinging needle, tells you the pitch of the note in Hertz and then shows you the pitch of what you’re playing (or singing) in Hertz and on the visual display. This makes it easy to tune your instrument up or down and re-check the pitch until it’s right.


chromatic tuners


n short, this application is ideal for most purposes. It acts as a pitch pipe and helps you tune your instrument. But that’s not all it does – There’s more.

Advanced Settings

The microphone can be optimised to pick up the pitch range of your instrument as well as fine-tuned to be more or less sensitive as required. If you need to, you can change the octave of the notes you’re given to tune from, which will make it much easier to tune your instrument if you’re not using the original octave.


chromatic tuners


For people who don’t use the ABCD naming convention, it’s possible to change to another system, such as solfege or AHCD.

Very Advanced Features Of gStrings Free Chromatic Tuner

For musicians who need something more than a straight chromatic scale, gStrings offers some incredibly advanced tuning features which you’ll love. You can change the tuning to be orchestra tuning, which redefines A from 440Hz to 443Hz. You can even change the temperaments to be equal, meantone, just, comma or more. Native C can also be made more or less precise according to your needs.


chromatic tuner


There are also even more options to tweak things including giving yourself more accurate markers in the display around the target note, FFT rounding or changing the scale range or tampering function.

Love it?

If you love the gStrings Tuner, you might like to know that they offer an ad-free version for 2€. Plus, the same company also make a metronome app for 1€ you should check out.

More Guitar-Based Reading

If you love guitar, there are dozens of excellent articles you should read on MakeUseOf. Try these for starters: