Online Pitch Pipe

For everything a pipe is normally used for, yes. It covers all twelve chromatic notes across six octaves instead of the four or six stamped on a metal pipe, it never drifts sharp as it warms in your hand, and it holds a note indefinitely without a breath. The physical version still wins when your battery is flat.

No. The page never asks for microphone access and performs no pitch detection whatsoever; it plays a reference and leaves the judgement to your ear. A microphone tuner that shows how many cents sharp or flat a string is sits separately on the roadmap, so wait for that one if you want a needle rather than a note.

A4 = 440 Hz has been the international standard since ISO 16 fixed it in 1955, and it is what nearly every keyboard, recording, and backing track assumes. Orchestras frequently sit higher at 442 or 443 to brighten the string sound, historically informed baroque ensembles usually play around 415 (a little over a semitone lower), and 432 has a real historical thread through Verdi's 1884 campaign for it in Italy, though none of the acoustic benefits later attached to it. Use whichever your group has agreed on; the arithmetic behind every other note is identical.

Sawtooth or square. Two pitches that are close but not identical produce a slow pulsing called beating, and the more overtones a tone carries, the more places that pulsing shows up. Sine is the most pleasant to listen to and the least useful for tuning, because it offers only the fundamental to beat against. Triangle is the starting default as a middle ground.

Play the reference and sound your string at the same time rather than one after the other, then listen for the wobble between them. Slow that wobble by adjusting the string, and when it stops the pitches agree. Finish by arriving at the note from slightly flat, which lets the string and machine head settle instead of creeping back down afterwards.

That is standard reentrant C tuning: the fourth string is a G4 sounding above the C4 beside it, which is where much of the instrument's jangle comes from. If you play a low-G set, tune that string to G3 instead by selecting octave 3 on the keyboard and pressing G.

No. Low E on a bass is 41.20 Hz, and most laptop and phone speakers reproduce very little below roughly 150 Hz, so you are hearing the limits of the speaker rather than a fault. Use headphones, switch to sawtooth so the overtones carry the pitch when the fundamental cannot, or tune to the octave above and check that the octave itself is clean.

Nothing is uploaded and no audio file is fetched: the tones are generated by a Web Audio oscillator inside this tab. Settings are also not written to storage, so reopening the page returns it to A4 at 440 Hz, octave 4, and a triangle wave.