Free Online Recorder Tuner

Recorders are written at concert pitch, so written note equals sounding note and this tuner applies no transposition. The soprano (descant) and bass sound an octave higher than written, but the letter names match, so the reading you see is the note on your page. Soprano and tenor recorders are in C, alto (treble) and bass are in F, and that changes the fingering, not the tuning.

The recorder has no reed and no embouchure to speak of, so breath pressure is almost the whole story of its intonation. Blow harder and the pitch rises; blow more gently and it falls. Each instrument is built to play in tune at a particular air pressure, and the first job with a tuner is to find it: play a middle-register note, watch the cents display, and adjust your air until the reading sits at zero. That pressure is your reference for everything else. The history line shows breath directly, a line that drifts upward means you are pushing harder as the note goes on, and a line that sags means the air is running out.

Overall pitch can be adjusted a little by pulling the head joint out, which lengthens the instrument and lowers the pitch, but only by a few cents before the joints’ internal tuning suffers. A cold recorder plays flat; warm the head joint in your hands or under your arm before you tune, and expect the pitch to rise a few cents over the first minutes of playing as condensation forms. Plastic instruments are more stable than wood; wooden instruments move more with humidity and need re-checking more often.

Individual notes have their own tendencies. High notes generally need more air and are easy to overblow sharp; low notes need gentle air and go flat, or break upward into the octave, if pushed. Where a note runs consistently out of line at your reference pressure, players adjust with shading, partially covering a hole below the sounding one, or with alternate fingerings. Many recorder players carry a small set of these corrections for their own instrument, and the tuner is how you find out which notes need them.

Baroque and early-music ensembles commonly play at A415, a semitone below modern pitch, and recorders built for that pitch will read roughly fifty cents flat against A440. Set the A = control to 415 and the tuner will read your instrument correctly. Some ensembles use A392 or A466; set whatever your group uses before you begin.