Free Online French Horn Tuner
Play a note — see exactly how in tune you are.
Allow microphone access to begin
How to use this tuner
Click Start Tuning and allow microphone access. Play a note — the tuner detects pitch in real time and shows how sharp or flat you are in cents.
The bar spans −50 to +50 cents. Zero is perfectly in tune. The history line shows where you’ve been — valuable for catching whether pitch settles after the attack or drifts on sustained notes.
French Horn (F) is already selected — note names match your written part. When you play a written C, the tuner shows F: a perfect fifth below concert pitch.
Default is A440. Tap + / − to match your ensemble — A441–442 is common in orchestras, A415 for historical pitch.
The French horn is an F transposing instrument: when you play a written C, the concert pitch is F, a perfect fifth below. Horn intonation is famously demanding because the narrow mouthpiece and conical bore make pitch highly sensitive to embouchure shape, air speed, and hand position in the bell. Open notes — no valves — tend to be more reliably centered; valve combinations, especially 2+3 and 1+2+3, often run flat and require either lipping up or adjusting individual valve slides. High notes are easily sharpened by overblowing; low notes go flat with insufficient air support. On double horns (Bb/F), the Bb side responds slightly differently in pitch than the F side, and players switching between them mid-phrase sometimes need to adjust. Hand stopping — inserting the right hand into the bell — can lower pitch by about a half step and is used for both technique and fine tuning. The pitch history display helps identify whether specific valve combinations consistently drift off center, or whether your pitch wobbles on sustained notes as air support changes — patterns that are easy to miss when you’re also monitoring tone, dynamics, and the rest of the ensemble.
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