Today I launched a new project called Sharp or Flat. Sharp or Flat is an online instrument tuner. Which in and of itself is nothing new, however, this particular tuner operates visually, like its real world counterpart, and that is new. The vast majority of current online instrument tuners simply play back tones for you to tune to, requiring you to have perfect/relative pitch. My tuner allows you to be tone deaf and still tune a guitar perfectly.
I developed the Sharp or Flat tuner with programmer Sam Rudge. He coded the javascript and applied it to my visual design. Then, with Mike Lombardo’s help, we coded the frequencies and it was ready to beta test. The Sharp or Flat tuner will use your computer’s built-in internal microphone, or any external audio source you plug into your computer.
The beta team had some good suggestions, most of which we implemented, and it’s now ready for public release.
In the future I hope to include tuners for other instruments, namely the ukulele, as it seems to be a favorite of YouTube musicians, but can’t be tuned with the current tuner because there is no C string option on the guitar tuner.
I’ve updated my personal projects page to include Sharp or Flat. I hope the tuner gets used often. If you have any ideas or suggestions for future Sharp or Flat updates, please leave them in the comments below.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
This looks great! I’m probably going to use this if I take my guitar anywhere and forget to bring my tuner along or something. Excellent, Alan!
This is so much better than other online tuners. It’s great for me because I’m not very good at matching pitches by ear, so I’ll definitely be using this website when I need to tune my guitar.
When I went on the site a few hours ago, my only negative thought was that I couldn’t use it to tune my ukulele too. I’d absolutely LOVE if it were updated to include a uke tuner also.
As a learning guitarist with no tuner of her own, I will DEFINITELY use this site! :)
It looks great, it’s just that i don’t like Java (not Javascript, they are different). Wish it could be implemented in Flash or something…
Actually it could, but why would you need to do that? What’s your problem with Java? I mean yes it does crash more often than pure HTML does, but so does flash…
It couldn’t have been done in Flash, we looked into it and Flash just didn’t have the features or accuracy. May be possible in HTML5 when that goes a bit more mainstream =)
This looks great! One suggestion, if this tuner ends up to be widely used, you should look into making it a iphone app.