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    The Seventh String Online Tuner

    From the same folks who brought you that fab computer aided transcription software I told you about, a browser-based software musical instrument tuner that actually works on a laptop. Vary it from 440, transpose it to Eb, it even thoughtfully includes noise-cancellation (which is why it works on laptops), and very thoughtfully, it's free.

    This chromatic tuner is sensitive (it can get an accurate reading from a quiet sound) and robust (when a note is being played, it is not easily distracted by extraneous sounds). With some tuners you have to be careful about exactly how you play the note. With this tuner, such care should not be necessary. The ability of the tuner to hear notes even against a background of ambient noise does mean that when there is ambient noise with no note being played, the tuner will tend to pick random notes out of the ambience from moment to moment. So in this situation the tuner will randomly wander around, imagining notes. I deliberately kept it this way since if it was less sensitive then it would be less able to detect notes which are being played.

    visit the  Seventh String Online Tuner

    You say you don't like Equal Temperament tunings? No problem, just do as the author does and remember the cents offset you want for that tone; except at the very low end, the readings are accurate to a fraction of a cent all the way to 20kHz.


    And if you'd rather a tuner that plays reference notes out loud, not to worry, they have that too: the Seventh String Tuning Fork. (and yes, there's a metronome too)

    Tags » musicianship
    • 6 September 2010
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    over 1 year ago ralph lichtensteiger liked this post.
    over 1 year ago DTclarinet (Twitter) responded:
    Dt-twitter_normal
    Sounds interesting. Seventh String online tuner. I'll check it out. Wldn't it be nice to have a just intonation tuner?
    over 1 year ago garym @teledyn responded:
    garym @teledyn
    one of my great disappointments with the computer age was the stark homogeneity it brought, musically most of all; where we should have had Cage's "waveforms from portraits of Beethoven" we instead got MIDI GM patches and some poor Berklee student's handwriting immortalized without thanks as the 'Jazz' mode script in notation softwares that have now frozen one particular system for all to use identically. And so to equal temperament, there should be and could be individual tuners on each key of any electronic keyboard, the computer within only sees ones and zeros, but what we got was some geek reading a first-level book on music and telling his boss that these were THE set of frequencies to synthesize.

    So I really appreciate Seventh String Software as one of those rare people who NEEDED the software for SERIOUS use first, then wrote it, then shared it with everyone else because they knew it was needed. He writes in his website that the need for allowing 'bent' intonation was actually a product of playing the 7-String Guitar where the bass string needs to be just out by THAT much. There's that same attention to what's really needed in the Transcribe! software too. It's a rare and precious thing with these machines.

    So while maybe it doesn't actually DO 'just' intonation, it can be employed with practice. Same is true for all the weird intonations that Wendy Carlos talks about in her Secrets of Synthesis lectures (where she applauds the synth companies for FINALLY accommodating new intonation experiments)

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