Tonewise is a beautiful, accurate chromatic tuner, metronome and drone for every musician.
Download on the App Store
• Real-time chromatic pitch detection with cents accuracy
• Needle or strobe display
• Presets for guitar, bass, ukulele, violin and cello (Standard, Drop D and more)
• Transposing-instrument support (Bb, Eb, F, G, A) for brass and woodwinds
• Adjustable reference pitch (A = 415–466 Hz)
• Reference tones to tune by ear
• 40–240 BPM with tap tempo
• Subdivisions: eighth, triplet, sixteenth
• Editable accent pattern for every beat
Tuning is more interesting than it looks. Cents, temperament and reference pitch explain why a perfectly tuned instrument can still sound wrong.
A4 = 440 Hz is the international reference pitch — the frequency everything else is measured against. Some orchestras tune slightly higher (442–443 Hz) for brightness.
432 Hz circulates online with claims about natural resonance and healing. There is no scientific support for those claims. If you enjoy how it sounds, that is a legitimate reason; the physics one is not.
A hundredth of a semitone — the unit tuners use because it is proportional. An octave is 1200 cents regardless of register, so the same cent value means the same perceived error high or low.
Trained listeners detect around 5–10 cents on sustained notes. Within ±5 cents is comfortably in tune for most instruments.
Mostly temperature and humidity — wood and steel expand at different rates, so a guitar taken from a cold car into a warm room will drift measurably. New strings also stretch for several days.
Mechanical causes: tuning down to a note rather than up leaves slack in the machine head, and a nut that pinches the string releases tension unevenly as you play.
Because tuners measure equal temperament, where every semitone is identical. That system is a compromise — it makes all keys usable at the cost of no interval being acoustically perfect.
On guitar this shows up as chords that beat slightly even when every string reads green. It is not your tuner being wrong; it is the tuning system being a deliberate trade-off.
Yes. Tonewise is a free download on the App Store.
Tonewise runs on iPhone and iPad and requires iOS 18.0 or later.
The download size is 4 MB.
The current version is 1.0.1, released on 2026-06-22.
Tonewise is available in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and more.
Tonewise is built by BIR (Build Intelligent Reality), an independent software studio founded by Birkan Aksoy. BIR has 44 apps on the App Store.
