Help & guides

Getting started

Install

Grab Reson8 for your platform from the download page — it detects your operating system and points you at the right store. Or skip installing entirely: Reson8 Web runs free in your browser, with everything except the professional piano and drum suites. Most browsers will also offer to install it to your home screen or dock, so it behaves like an app from then on.

First run

1. Allow microphone access when asked. Reson8 listens locally — audio never leaves your device.
2. Pick a workflow — guitar, bass, ukulele, piano, wind or drums. Each has its own presets and display.
3. Play a note. The input meter should move and the strobe should light. If it stays dark, see troubleshooting.

Reading the display

Colour is tuning state

Three colours carry the verdict, and they are never used for anything else: MINT means locked (within 3 cents), AMBER means close but still moving (within 15 cents), and RED means clearly out. If something on screen is glowing, it's live signal — chrome never glows.

The strobe

The rings behave like a mechanical strobe disc: they rotate at a rate equal to your frequency error and stand dead still when you're on pitch. Direction tells you which way you're off — rotation one way means sharp, the other flat — and speed tells you how far. Unlike a needle, a strobe has no smoothing to hide behind: a slow creep you'd never see on a needle is an obvious drift here.

Each ring is locked to a different partial of the note, measured independently. On most instruments they agree; on piano they must not — see the piano guide.

The spectrum

Below the strobe is a constant-Q spectrum: 160 bins, 24 per octave, from 55 Hz to 5.4 kHz. Equal steps on screen are equal musical intervals, so an octave is the same width at the bottom of the display as at the top, and adjacent bass notes stay visibly separate. It is fed before the noise gate, so it keeps showing the room even in silence.

The drift trace

The intonation trace plots your pitch over the last several seconds on a ±25-cent scale. Use it to see what happens after the attack: does the note settle, sag, or ride sharp? For wind players this is the long-tone practice display.

The input meter

Live level with clipping and gate state. If it shows clipping, back off the input or move the mic — a clipped signal distorts the very harmonics the engine is measuring.

Guitar

Tunings

Twenty-one presets cover standard, drop, open, modal and 12-string course tunings. Select one and the display shows each string's target; play a string and Reson8 identifies which one you meant.

Strum mode

Strum all six strings at once and every string is measured in the same frame — an independent frequency, cents offset and clarity per string, with no string-by-string picking. Use it as a ten-second health check before a set, then fine-tune any string the readout flags.

Why your low E doesn't read an octave high

An acoustic guitar's body resonates hard around 247 Hz, so a plucked low E can arrive with its fundamental quieter than its own overtones — the classic way cheap tuners read E3 instead of E2. Reson8 tests sub-harmonic candidates and promotes them only when they genuinely correlate better, which keeps low strings anchored without inventing octaves on clean signals.

Bass & ukulele

Bass

Presets cover 4-, 5- and 6-string basses in standard and drop tunings. The analysis window is sized for slow, low fundamentals: the detector reaches from below a 5-string's low B (30.9 Hz) down past A0 (27.5 Hz), so every preset's bottom string is inside the measured band. Give the lowest strings a full second of ring — a 31 Hz string simply takes longer to complete enough cycles to measure than a 330 Hz one.

Ukulele

Reson8 is reentrant-aware: high-G standard, low G, baritone, D tuning and slack-key presets list strings as strung — string 4 first — not sorted by pitch. On a high-G uke, string 4 really is higher than string 3, and the display respects that.

Piano

Piano mode is a full tuning instrument: it measures your piano's inharmonicity per key, solves a tuning curve from those measurements, and gives you a per-partial strobe, unison beat rates, temperaments and pitch-raise over-pull. Everything autosaves to a per-instrument record.

1 · Measure the piano

Stiff strings run their partials sharp of exact harmonics by a factor B that varies by two orders of magnitude across one instrument — no lookup table can know your piano. Play single, clean notes across the compass and Reson8 fits B for each measured key. Around a dozen keys spread over the range is enough to anchor the model; a measurement that can't produce a clean partial series reports failure rather than a plausible-looking number.

2 · The solved curve

Every interval a tuning tries to make beatless contributes one constraint, and on a real piano they contradict each other — that's the whole reason tuning is a craft. Reson8 solves the weighted least-squares compromise across all 88 keys, with A4 on the fork. Octaves, twelfths, double octaves and nineteenths participate; fifths deliberately don't, because the comma they'd distribute belongs to the temperament, not the stretch.

3 · Stretch styles and interval weights

Four stretch styles are supplied — they're weight sets over the interval table, leaning on wider or narrower octave types. The WEIGHTS dialog exposes the seven underlying sliders directly, so you can bias, say, 4:2 octaves over 2:1 in the treble. Weights are relative — only their balance matters — and re-selecting a style resets them, so a preset always arrives clean. Custom weights are saved with the instrument's record.

4 · Tune with the per-partial strobe

Each strobe ring locks to its own partial. This matters on piano: stiffness pushes partial n sharp of n× the fundamental, so when a key's fundamental is exactly on target, its upper partials are correctly off their rings — the rings refusing to agree is the instrument being honest. Setting a 4:2 octave means working partial 4 of the lower key against partial 2 of the upper — watch those two rings, not the fundamental.

5 · Unisons

A spectrum can't resolve two strings half a beat apart — but your ear doesn't either; it hears the beat. Reson8 does the same: it demodulates a partial and times the amplitude beats, reporting beats per second. Two things to know:

• Verdicts take a few seconds by construction. A quarter-beat-per-second unison needs four seconds to complete one cycle — the display says "listening" until it has the evidence.
• Restriking restarts the clock. The detector rejects the rhythm of repeated strikes as a false beat, so strike once and let it ring.

6 · Temperaments

Equal temperament plus seven historical temperaments — Werckmeister III, 1/4-comma meantone, Pythagorean and more — each derived from its circle-of-fifths rule and anchored so A stays on the fork whichever you select. Temperament rides on top of the stretch as a separate layer.

7 · Pitch raise

Raising overall tension flexes the frame, so strings tuned early go flat as the rest come up. Pitch-raise mode overshoots each note based on the neighbourhood's average deficiency — it's aggregate tension that moves the structure — and the strobe guides you to the overshoot target directly. Over-pull is capped at 35 cents; a piano far flatter than that wants two passes, and the cap is there to protect its strings.

8 · Records

Every measurement, style choice, weight edit and reference change autosaves to a record for that instrument. Open the record at the next appointment and the curve is exactly as you left it — measurements are replayed through the same engine call a live measurement takes.

Brass & woodwinds

Transposing readout

Select your instrument's key — B♭, E♭ or F — and the display shows the note you finger, not the concert pitch that sounds. Play a written C on a B♭ trumpet and the screen says C, judged against the sounding B♭.

Long tones

The drift trace is built for long-tone work: hold a note and watch the line, not the needle. A tone that starts centred and sags 10 cents as you run out of air is invisible on an instantaneous readout and obvious on the trace. The ±25-cent scale is deliberately tight — at that zoom, embouchure habits have nowhere to hide.

Drums

Lug map

Clearing a head means equal tension at every lug. Tap two inches in from each lug and Reson8 places the reading on a circular map of the hoop, so uneven tension shows up as an uneven ring — tune the outliers toward the rest.

Fundamental and overtone

The map is driven by the ratio between the head's fundamental (f₀₁) and its first edge overtone (f₁₁) — the modal ratio that determines how a drum speaks. Batter and resonant heads are tuned the same way; their relationship sets the shell's sustain and pitch bend.

Settings

Troubleshooting

The display stays dark when I play

• Check the OS microphone permission for Reson8 — on macOS and mobile it's asked once, and a denial is remembered.
• Check the input meter. If it doesn't move at all, the OS is handing Reson8 the wrong input device — pick the right one in your system sound settings.
• If the meter moves but the tuner doesn't wake, the noise gate may be set too strict for a quiet instrument. Ease the sensitivity toward permissive.

The reading jumps around

• A clipped input distorts harmonics — if the meter shows clipping, back away from the mic.
• Other pitched sound in the room (a TV, another instrument) competes for the tracker. The spectrum will show you exactly what else is sounding.
• On guitar, old strings with dead windings produce genuinely unstable pitch — the tuner is reporting it, not causing it.

It disagrees with my other tuner

On piano, and on the low strings of anything acoustic, that's expected — and Reson8 is the one with the evidence. Inharmonicity puts a real instrument's partials sharp of the textbook values, so a tuner that listens to an overtone and assumes it's a perfect multiple reads differently from one that measures the partial as it actually is. The spectrum shows you the partials; you can check both claims against it.

Unisons say "listening" for a long time

That's the physics: a beat can't be observed faster than it beats. A very slow beat takes several seconds to complete a cycle, and striking the key again restarts the observation. Strike once, let it ring, wait for the number.

The very top of the piano won't lock

A7 and C8 are beyond the pitch tracker's band. Tune them by octave against the ear or the spectrum — which is what most technicians do up there anyway, fundamental energy being as scarce as it is.

The web version won't hear anything

• Browsers require a click before a page may open the microphone — if the banner says it's waiting, tap or click once anywhere in the app.
• If you previously denied the microphone, the browser remembers: look for the microphone icon in the address bar and re-allow it, then reload.
• The app itself turns off the browser's voice-call processing (echo cancellation, noise suppression, automatic gain) — those settings eat decaying strings. If readings still look wrong, check that no browser extension is intercepting audio.

FAQ

Is there a free version?

Yes — Reson8 Web runs free in your browser, no account and no time limit. It's the same engine compiled to WebAssembly, and it covers guitar, bass, ukulele, brass and woodwinds in full: strobe, spectrum, strum mode, drift trace, all of it. Our gift to the music community.

What's different in the web version?

The professional piano and drum tuning suites are only in the full desktop and mobile apps. They aren't switched off in the web version — they're absent from its engine entirely — so what remains behaves exactly like the paid app, with no nag screens and no degraded readings.

Does audio leave my device?

No. All analysis runs locally in a native engine — and in the web version, locally in your browser. Reson8 works with no network connection at all, and piano records are files on your device.

How accurate is it, really?

On a 440 Hz reference tone the measured error is ±0.003 cents. On real room recordings of an acoustic guitar, frame-to-frame spread on a plucked low string is under half a hertz — which is why the strobe sits still instead of shimmering. Those numbers come from the engine's own regression suite, which runs against both synthetic tones and real recordings on every build.

Do I need a special microphone?

No. Built-in laptop and phone mics are fine for tuning: pitch lives in timing, not fidelity. For piano inharmonicity measurement, quieter rooms and closer placement help the partial fits.

Is my old tuner's "±1 cent" the same as your cents?

A cent is a cent — 1/100 of a semitone. The difference between tuners is what they measure it against: Reson8 measures each partial as it actually sounds on your instrument rather than assuming textbook harmonics.

Which platforms are supported?

Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android — one engine everywhere. See the download page for stores and system requirements.

I found a bug. Where does it go?

Use the feedback option on your store's listing page. A recording of the sound that confused it is the single most useful thing you can include in a report.