How to Use the Tuner & Pitch Trainer

Pitch Practice is a free ear-training tool for voice and instruments that helps you learn to match pitches accurately. Sing or play a note into your microphone and a tuner-style needle shows you exactly how sharp or flat you are, in real time. Everything runs in your browser — your audio is analyzed on your device and is never recorded, uploaded, or stored anywhere.

Practice modes

On a narrow screen a Setup line sits just below the tabs, summarizing everything you're set up to practice — range, difficulty and drill — and tapping it opens the Setup sheet. On a wide screen the Setup panel is always open down the right-hand side instead, so there is nothing to summarize.

Random drills

Pick Random if you want general pitch practice rather than a specific exercise. On Easy it's a single random note from your practice range. On Medium and Hard it's a short two- or three-note pattern — a step, a third, a fifth, a triad — moved to a new random starting note each time, so you're practicing the shape rather than memorizing the pitches. See Difficulty for how the note count is set.

Interval drills

Pick Intervals as the drill to practice specific interval jumps — a Major 3rd, a Perfect 5th, an Octave — over and over from a different random starting note each time, ascending, descending, or randomly either way. Each drill is always two notes, and the pair can straddle the treble/bass split — the staff takes its clef from the lower note and puts the upper one on ledger lines. Both notes still have to fit your practice range, so a wide interval in a narrow range may have only one or two possible starting notes, or none at all; when that happens a line under the staff says so and points you at the range controls.

Scale drills

Pick Scales as the drill to practice major scales. Choose any of the 12 keys and whether to play the scale Up (8 notes) or Up & down (15). The key's signature is drawn next to the clef and the noteheads carry no accidentals of their own, exactly as written music does it — F major shows a single flat in the signature rather than a flat on every B. Notes are still spelled by key, so that note is a B♭ and never an A♯, and if you have a transposing instrument selected the key you pick is the key you read. A scale always starts on the lowest octave that fits your practice range; the Octave button steps up through the other octaves that fit, and is disabled when only one does.

Difficulty

Easy/Medium/Hard controls both how wide the gauge's "in tune" tolerance zone is and how long you need to hold a pitch steady before it counts as a match. It also sets how many notes a Random drill has: 1 on Easy, 2 on Medium, 3 on Hard. The other drills set their own length — interval drills are always two notes, a scale is 8 or 15, and a Custom sequence is whatever you build.

Time limit

An optional clock, set under Time limit in the Setup panel, for practising fluency rather than accuracy alone. Choose Per note (2–60 seconds, 5 by default) or Per drill (10–600 seconds, 30 by default), and a countdown appears beside the target note. Running out of time never interrupts anything — the drill carries on, nothing is skipped, and you still sing the note. What changes is only whether it counts: a note matched after its limit has run out does not count as matched, and with a per-drill limit no note counts once the drill's clock has run out. Those notes still count towards how in tune you were, so the summary of a shared drill reports both how accurately and how quickly you sang — see Sharing a drill below for when that summary appears, since a drill you set up yourself does not show one. The clock runs only while the microphone is live and nothing is playing, so the reference tone costs you no time, and stopping part-way pauses the clock where it was rather than starting it again. Only drills with a set ending can be timed — an interval, a scale, or your own sequence — and a shared drill carries its limit with it.

Reading the staff

The clef changes automatically to suit the pitch — bass for low notes, treble for high — and a Scales drill adds that key's signature beside it. When a drill has more notes than fit across the staff at once, the view scrolls: a line underneath tells you which ones you're looking at ("Showing notes 3–7 of 12"), and it follows along as you match. If a note can't be drawn on the current clef at all, a separate warning line says so rather than the note quietly going missing.

Practice range

Pick a Voice Type preset (Bass, Baritone, Tenor, Alto, Soprano) or adjust your Low/High limits up or down to focus practice on your comfortable range.

Playing a transposing instrument? Pick it from the Instrument list in place of Concert Pitch. A B♭ Trumpet's written C, for example, actually sounds a concert B♭ — picking your instrument keeps the staff, target note name, and Low/High range all consistent with your own written part, while the pitch you actually need to sing or play stays on real concert pitch throughout.

Hearing the target

Play tone sounds the note you're aiming for. While anything is sounding that same button reads Stop, so you can cut it short. Your microphone is muted for as long as a tone is sounding, so the app can never mistake its own output for your voice — a small note on screen tells you when that's happening. A drill of several notes plays through once as a reference, and the highlight travels with the sound across the staff and the keyboard, so you can see which notehead each pitch belongs to.

Auto-play & Auto-advance

Auto-play plays the target tone automatically whenever a new note comes up. Auto-advance moves on to a new target automatically once you've matched it, instead of waiting for you to click Next.

Session stats

Tracks Notes Attempted, % In Tune, and your current/best streak for this session, plus an all-time best streak that persists across visits.

Sharing a drill

Copy link to this drill in the Setup panel puts a link on your clipboard to whatever you're practicing right now — the button reads Link copied! for a moment to confirm it — a scale, an interval drill, a custom sequence, a random drill, or the tuner. Send it to a student or a friend and opening it sets them up with the same drill. The drill travels in the link itself: nothing is uploaded, and no account is needed by either of you.

Opening a shared link asks before it replaces what you're currently practicing, so a saved custom sequence of your own is never overwritten without your say-so. Your range, difficulty, and instrument stay yours — a shared drill is practiced in your own register, not the sender's — though your range widens if the drill needs more room than it currently has.

Finishing a drill someone shared with you shows a summary you can show them back: what the drill was, your range, how many notes you matched, how far off they were on average, any time limit and whether you met it, and when you finished. A drill you set up yourself shows no summary — there is nobody to report it to, and a report you could switch off would not be worth much to the person asking for it. The summary also stops appearing if you change the drill after opening the link, since at that point you are practicing something else — and that includes changing its time limit, which is part of what was assigned.

Email these results on that summary opens a message with everything it says already written out, so you can send it to whoever assigned the drill. The recipient is left blank for you to fill in, and nothing is sent anywhere by itself — the message opens in your own mail app and goes nowhere until you send it. Treat it as a convenient way to report what you did, not as proof of it: it is ordinary text in your own outbox, so anyone could edit it before sending. It is built for honest use rather than to be tamper-proof, which is not something a web page can offer.

Appearance

Switch between Light, Dark, or System (follows your device's setting) at any time from the Setup panel.

Show keyboard

Show keyboard brings up a piano keyboard at the bottom of the screen, for building a Custom sequence or just for visual reference. It opens by itself when you pick the Custom drill, since tapping keys is how you build one, and you can hide it again whenever you want the gauge back — on a small screen the two want the same space, so it's one or the other.

You can use the keyboard without a mouse. Press Tab until the piano is focused, then use the left and right arrow keys to move from key to key, Home and End to jump to the lowest or highest key, and Enter or Space to add the focused key to a Custom sequence. The whole piano is a single stop in the tab order, so moving past it takes one press rather than one per key.

Keys are labeled, and with a transposing instrument selected each one carries your written note on top and the concert (real) pitch beneath it in parentheses. The highlighted key is always the real pitch, like a physical piano: in a drill it marks the note you're aiming at, with the drill's other notes tinted more faintly, and in Tuner it follows whatever you're actually singing. The keyboard covers your practice range — except in Tuner, where it widens to every note the app supports, since tuning isn't range-limited. On a narrow screen it scrolls sideways rather than shrinking the keys.

PITCH PRACTICE