Software roundup: Guitar tuning options on your Windows Phone

Published by Steve Litchfield at 11:19 UTC, January 6th 2014

You may remember that, almost a year ago, I reviewed Accurate Tuner Pro here on AAWP? I rated it highly, but there have been plenty of new competitors, of varying degrees of quality, released since. In the spirit of starting 2014 with options for you, the Windows Phone enthusiast (and musician), here's my round up of tuning utilities for the platform - for the guitar, at least. Other instrument round-ups may follow in due course!

From the intro to my original review of Accurate Tuner Pro:

Guitar playing and fiddling with tech seem to go hand in hand, judging from the number of fellow strummers I've come across. Many worse than me and a greater number a lot better. But we all have to tune our guitars every time we get the 'ol six string (or in my case the 12-string) out - which is why there's a booming cottage industry on every mobile platform in guitar tuning aids of every type. Here's a comprehensive option for Windows Phone....

Before delving into what Accurate Tuner Pro (ATP) does, I should go a little philosophical, noting that there's a distinct benefit to staying 'old school' and low-tech, in that sampling tuners reduce tuning each string to tweaking the tuning pegs and watching the fancy animations - you essentially stop fiddling when the display says so and never mind how the string sounds. Ultimately, as a player, you want to improve, but you also want to improve your musical ear, I'm often appalled by the numbed of players who carry on strumming something which is obviously out of tune because they just can't 'hear it'. I should emphasise that I haven't got 'perfect pitch', but I can recognise when a note's not 'right'. In part this is because I've usually tuned my guitar by ear, playing a tuning fork to get a reference tone and then tuning by harmonics across the strings, or by playing the appropriate notes on a nearby electronic piano or organ and tuning to those.

Even with ATP, after tuning across all the strings, my guitar didn't sound 'right' - every guitar has its own little, miniscule idiosyncrasies, i.e. no instrument is perfectly intoned. By tuning by ear, I was able to make these little allowances as I went.

The argument against tuning using reference tones, by ear, is that 'on stage' (i.e. in a noisy and busy environment), it's hard to hear accurately enough to make the needed changes. By plugging your instrument into an electronic tuner, you can interface directly with a tuning engine and get accurate pitch even if Motorhead are playing on the other side of the room.

This then is the big selling point of sampling/'chromatic' tuners - except that here, on your Windows Phone, you can't plug your instrument in - you're reliant on the microphone - which brings us back to problems in noisy rooms: in this case, the software having to pick individual frequencies from a barrage of sound. Which often doesn't work very well.

Armed with this background, let's delve into the barrage of current guitar tuning options for Windows Phone. Starting with the title already linked...