Nitpitch

Nitpitch is a tuner for string players — violin, guitar, bass, and more. Born violin-first, for the way string players actually tune, and every bit as at home on a guitar or bass. A DIAL PER STRING Choose your instrument and every string gets its own dial, lit only by pitches near its own target. Bow two adjacent strings and the tuner reads them together, showing the interval as the beats you already listen for — the pulse rate IS the tuning error, and it stills as the fifth comes true. BUILT FOR EARS THAT NOTICE Sub-cent accuracy across the range, which is what tuning actually needs — a cent at A4 is about a quarter of a hertz. No octave errors: string instruments put more energy into their harmonics than their fundamental, which is what makes naive tuners jump octaves, and Nitpitch's detector is built to resolve exactly that. For the last fraction of a cent, a strobe band shows sub-cent error as motion — crawling sharp or flat, stationary when true. YOUR ORCHESTRA'S A The reference pitch steps a hertz at a time, A=390 through 466 — 440 by default, 442 or 443 for many European orchestras, 415 for baroque ensembles. Temperaments too: equal, or pure fifths — the default on bowed instruments, because that is how string players tune. INSTRUMENTS YOU OWN Each instrument remembers its tuning, reference and lock exactly as you left it. Favorites sit on the launch screen with one-tap preset pins. Save your own presets, rename them, pin them — and any shape can be strung up: a 9-string guitar is a creation choice, not a missing feature. SHARE A TUNING Any preset becomes a QR code or a link: a bandmate scans it and gets the whole setup — strings, reference, temperament. Nothing but the setup travels, and it is never sent to any server. A collection of ready-made tunings lives at nitpitch.app. TUNE WITHOUT LOOKING The Apple Watch app runs its own microphone and detection on the wrist — no phone needed — and speaks in haptics: taps at the string's real beat rate against its target, faster the further off you are, silence when it's true. A glance at the arc gives direction. It ships inside the iPhone app and installs standalone from the watch's own App Store; your instruments arrive over iCloud sync. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION Audio is analyzed in memory and discarded: no recording, no history, nothing derived from it kept. The app makes no network connections — the Mac version does not even hold the entitlement to open one. Optional iCloud sync, off until you turn it on, moves only your setups between your own devices through your own iCloud account; there is no server of ours, and no ability to read what syncs. FOR THE WHOLE SECTION Violin, viola, cello, double bass, guitar, bass guitar — and a chromatic mode for everything else. Native on iPhone, iPad, and Mac; on the Mac, plugging an electric instrument into an audio interface gives the detector a cleaner signal than any microphone in a room. Free and open source (MIT). No ads, no accounts, no tracking.