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Intonation analyser · Strings · Winds · Brass

Is your F♯ better than it was in March?

A tuner answers for the note you play now. wabetune measures how in tune you play and keeps the measurements, session after session, so the notes that drift show up as a pattern.

Nine tuning systems Fifteen sessions free No account until you save The audio never leaves your browser

For any instrument where you place the pitch: a violin, a cello, a horn, a flute. The piano is out, because the note is decided before you arrive.

The.instant
Each cell is a note, across the octaves your instrument reaches. The colour shows how far off you were, in cents. A tuner does this part too.
The.session

Your F♯ is in tune. Unless you are in D major.

Same recording, judged twice. Against equal temperament this F♯ is on the note. Declare D major and it sits fourteen cents above where the third of the chord belongs: a pure third is 13.7 cents under the piano's.

That is the number a quartet tunes to. A tuner will say the note is fine. Your cellist will say it beats.

The top D stays sharp in both. No key helps with that one.

Just intonation, and the twenty-two cents most apps ignore.

An F♯ above a D has three defensible places to be.

  • Equal 400.0
  • Just 5:4 386.3
  • Pythagorean 81:64 407.8

wabetune reads the spread of your own repetitions first: that number holds whatever system you are playing in.

The twelve numbers, degree by degree, including the two we refuse to guess.

A D major scale on a violin, two octaves, played as a piano would play it.
The.archive

Come back in six weeks and see what changed.

Improving is a question about weeks, and a tuner answers about now. The graph puts a line for your average deviation and bars for the time you played on one axis. The dashed line is today's tolerance, so you judge old sessions against where you are headed.

Fifteen sessions over five weeks, which is the whole of the free allowance.
The.ensemble

Tune the chord, not just the note.

A quartet reads a new piece. Bar twelve, a D major chord, and it beats. The viola says the cello is low, the cello says the F♯ is high, the second violin is sure it is the viola, and the first violin moves anyway. Twenty minutes later the chord still beats and nobody knows who moved.

Leave Spectrum listening on the stand through the rehearsal. It hears the four of you at once and puts beside every note how far it is from the tuning system you agreed on. Under the picture it names the chord, and shows how far each note is from the pure interval over the root that was actually played.

The F♯ a tuner calls twelve cents flat is four cents high against the cello's D. That is the note that moves, by four cents, and the chord stops beating. The argument takes as long as reading two numbers.

The map is for practising on your own, one note at a time. Spectrum is for playing together, and records nothing. On the free plan it listens two minutes a day; after the €4.99, for as long as the rehearsal lasts.

D, G, A7 and D again. Watch the second violin's F♯: 12 cents under equal and 4 over the pure third in the first D, 15 under and 1 over in the last.
The.report

The page your teacher asks for.

Choose a window in the statistics (a day, a week, a month, a year) and share it as a PDF. Send it before the lesson and spend the lesson playing.

  • How it was measured: the concert A, the system and its tonic, the tolerance.
  • The period: sessions, time played, average deviation, notes.
  • The graph of deviation and time, as on screen.
  • Notes to improve, the most demanding first, with deviation and swing.
  • Intervals to improve: the ones that keep coming back wrong, in the same direction.
  • The map over the period, and the list of sessions.

On a phone it opens the share sheet; on a computer it downloads. The tables leave out sessions measured under other settings and say how many.

The.price

After fifteen sessions it keeps working and stops remembering.

Free

Fifteen sessions

Everything the instrument does, for fifteen sessions, and Spectrum two minutes a day. Nothing expires.

What you get Free €4.99 once
The map, the needle, the cents, live while you playYesYes
The tuner, at any concert A from 390 to 460YesYes
Nine tuning systems: just major and minor, Pythagorean, equal, two meantones, Vallotti, Werckmeister III, Kirnberger IIIYesYes
Tolerance, transposition, cell memory, response speed, shortest noteYesYes
The report at the end of a session: worst note, least steady, note by noteYesYes
Hearing a session played back against its own mapYesYes
The results of your sessions as a PDF, for your teacherYesYes
Installable, and opens without a networkYesYes
An account, and your sessions on every device you useYesYes
Spectrum: everyone in the room at once, and the chordTwo minutes a dayNo limit
Sessions keptFifteenNo limit
The archive, and the graph of how you are improvingYour fifteenEverything you play

Nine of the twelve rows are the same on both sides. After fifteen sessions the instrument works as it did. The €4.99 buys the sessions and the archive without a limit, and Spectrum for a whole rehearsal.

The.whole.of.it

Everything the instrument does.

Written out, so you know what it measures.

01 · Instruments

Whose intonation it measures

  • Strings: violin, viola, cello, double bass (five-string and C-extension too), fretless bass, oud: wherever a finger places the note, not a fret.
  • Woodwind: oboe, clarinet, flutes, recorders, saxophones, bassoons.
  • Brass: horn, trumpets, trombone and low brass.
  • The double bass reads below 42 Hz, where most pitch detection fails.
  • Not the piano, marimba or organ: there the pitch is decided before you play.
02 · Listening

What it hears

  • All the notes your instrument can sound, on one map.
  • A note's pitch is the median of its readings, the bowed attack discarded.
  • A cell averages what landed on it, weighted by how long you held it, over a window you choose.
  • Off by (sharp or flat) and swing (consistency between attempts) stay separate.
  • When it cannot confirm a note's octave, it marks the note and keeps it.
03 · Declaring

What you tell it

  • The tonic and the tuning system, and nothing else.
  • Counted from a tonic, so it follows the key: just major, just minor, Pythagorean.
  • Counted from the keyboard, fixed in every key: equal, quarter- and sixth-comma meantone, Vallotti, Werckmeister III, Kirnberger III. Equal is the default.
  • A degree no system places stays blank, drawn differently from zero.
04 · Spectrum

What it hears together

  • Everyone in the room at once, and the chord they make, by name.
  • Each note against the tuning system you agreed on, as on the map.
  • And against the pure interval over the chord's root, as it was played.
  • Not a session: nothing is recorded. Two minutes a day on the free plan.
05 · Setting

What you can move

  • Five levels of in tune, from ten cents down to two.
  • Concert A from 390 to 460, 442 by default. Changing it starts a new session.
  • Transposition, for an instrument written in one key and sounding in another.
06 · Reporting

What you get back

  • The note furthest out and the note least steady, with the figures.
  • Note by note: deviation, swing and times played, over the whole session.
  • Intervals that keep coming back wrong, in the same direction: a third that is always too narrow.
  • It flags notes with an unconfirmed octave.
  • Hear it back: the session replays against its own map.
  • Share a window (a week, a month, a year) as a PDF for your teacher.

Fifteen sessions is about a week of practising.