Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Best Tuner for singing?

Could someone recommend the most accurate/best tuner for recognizing vocal notes? I am a pianist that is going to be singing! I want to practice to make sure I'm hitting the notes correctly. I'm happy to pay for something professional and accurate. I'm looking for a tuner type of device that would tell me the exact note (and octave) that I'm singing. I tried a few phone apps and didn't think they worked very well. Is there a professional software or piece of professional hardware that I could buy? I'm new to all this so sorry in advance for my lack of knowledge on terminology. Thank you!

Instead of investing $300, $600, or $1,000 for pro-level piano tuning apps or devices, I strongly suggest you take what you may have budgeted and hire a voice teacher. There are plenty of good ones in the Twin Cities.

It would be also a good idea to be doing your ear training and vocal work from a freshly tuned piano as your primary practice instrument.

As human voice has zero inharmonicity, about any software should give very accurate results, hardware quality (mics etc...) is not really important when measuring frequency, but by the end of the day your ears should do the job...

I just tried the ones I had on my iphone. The one that responded best to singing is called "Pitch chromatic tuner" - it wasn't too jumpy to use like some of the apps more suited to instrument tuning. It displays note name and octave number which you should be able to translate to musical notation.

Ron Koval

Hi Ron, I have an Android phone.

There's one in Play Store called "Free Universal Tuner". I had downloaded it in the past and it's actually pretty nifty. It responded to my voice so I think it would work okay. Hey, it's free! Be sure to look at all the instructions. I set it on chromatic so it will cover the whole keyboard. Also, one of the nice things is that if you hold down a note (there's a keyboard on it) it will play a tone so you can match to it or hear it, stop it and see if you can match it.

TE Tuner

https://www.tonalenergy.com/

edit: hey I recommended this yesterday lol!

You can always try a bunch of free ones. In the settings, look for "damping" or "response speed" and set to the slowest setting for voice.

It can be a rude awakening to see how difficult it is to hold a steady tone while singing!

Ron Koval

I was talking to a singer about that yesterday. I mentioned that many years ago, there was a Guinness World's Records show on television, and Sarah Vaughn was on to try to hold a note at pitch for some amount of time. They said she did it; I heard the pitch drop lower and lower.

My singer friend said that in order to hold the pitch steady, you need to aim to sing it higher and higher.

I believe that the best way to recognize tunings is to train your ears.

This is what I use on wind instruments. I like the display and the cost is reasonable.

But for singing in tune I think using a drone is more useful than watching a tuner.

You play drones (I recommend the youtube cello drones) and sing along, matching pitch.

One exercise used by trombone players is to have the drone playing, and sing or hum the note, and slowly with control gliss up and down a half step, listening for beats. I also sing and play slow scales to a drone note.

On wind instruments there is an advanced technique recommended by some that I doubt would work on voice: You have the drone playing on speakers behind you, and a tuner on a music stand in front of you. Play a slow scale along with the drone note, and notice when the beats say you are in just tuning versus ET on the tuner screen. Wind musicians need to have both skills.

Of course you also need to record yourself singing to check your pitch (the singer at the RNC convention should have thought of that, before she learned the hard way).