Play guitar? Then you periodically need to tune your axe. Ovi Store currently offers several tuning apps for guitarists, but which ones work best? To find out, I compared three mobile apps from Ovi Store that promise to keep my guitar true, not blue: Tunerific, Guitar Tuner, and Chromatic Instrument Tuner. Let’s look at each one separately:

I) TUNERIFIC: This is actually three apps in one.

Tunerific Pro: Of all the apps I tested, this is the one most like a standalone guitar tuner. First you select on the display the string you want to tune, whether that’s low E, A, D, G, B, or high E (only standard tuning is offered). Next, you pluck that string on your guitar, holding your instrument close to the phone. As you play, a curved dial on the display, looking something like a car’s speedometer, shows you graphically whether the note is flat, sharp, or spot on. When the string is correctly in tune, the dial displays the name of the correct note, and the meter glows green in its centre. I found this simple, easy, and fast. Below, you can see that I’m tuning the A string, but that it’s still a bit flat.

Tone Tuner: Available both as part of the Tunerific package or separately, this app gives you another way to tune. It’s a tone generator. That means it plays the note, and you then tune your guitar by ear, doing your best to match the tone produced on your phone. The big difference is that, unlike Tunerific Pro, Tone Tuner handles not only standard tuning, but also 11 other tunings, including dropped D and open G.

The graphic is different, too. Tone Tuner shows an image of three frets of a guitar neck. Using its menus, you select one of the 12 possible tunings. Then you return to the image of the guitar neck, and touch a string to hear its note. It’s then up to you to tune your guitar to that note; the program does not tell you whether you are tuned correctly. But you can adjust the volume (discrete, normal, or loud), and you can also set the app to repeat the tone until you tap the string a second time (very useful for tuning by ear!). Below, you can see the A string shown in red as it sounds:

Chords: This app lets you define a chord, then look up one possible fingering for that chord. First you select the root of the chord you want (A, Bb, C, etc.). Then you select the chord type: major, minor, major seventh, ninth, etc. Finally, using the same image of a guitar fretboard, the app shows you one fingering for a chord. For example, below is the app’s suggestion for a Cmaj7 chord:

Somewhat oddly, the numbers in the white circles above refer to the fret numbers (not fingers, as is usual). The red circles indicate where you should place your fingers, and the X represents a dampened (unplucked) string.

Of course, there are many ways to finger a Cmaj7 chord, and the Chords apps shows you only one. Still, this chord reference could come in handy anytime you need an odd, rarely played chord (C#7sus4, anyone?). And according to the app’s developers, there are more than 300 chords in there, enough so you can leave your heavy chord book at home.

II) GUITAR TUNER

Guitar Tuner from Pico Brothers is essentially a tone generator, another way of saying it’s a fancy tuning fork or pitch pipe. Like Tone Tuner, it displays a photograph of a guitar fretboard with each string labelled by its note in standard tuning. When you tap a label (for example, D, as shown below), the app sounds that note. Tap the string two times, and you hear the note twice. You then tune your guitar as best you can to that note.

One handy feature of Guitar Tuner: If you press the Repeat button in the upper left hand of the screen, the note you’ve selected will repeat every few seconds until you press the Repeat button again. That’s helpful as you try to bring your own guitar’s string in tune with the sound. When you’re done, you simply press the X in the lower right-hand of the screen, and that’s it. There are no alternate tunings, and no gauge to indicate when your guitar is in tune. Told you Guitar Tuner was simple!

III) CHROMATIC INSTRUMENT TUNER

This app is pretty snazzy. It contains two components. The first shows the frequency of a sound played on your instrument, anywhere in the range of 50 Hz to 1100 Hz, then guesses — fairly accurately — which note you’re going for. Hit the note again after you’ve adjusted the tuning, and the app shows you how close or far you are to the desired note. The second component is another tone generator, albeit more sophisticated than either Guitar Tuner or Tone Tuner.

Unlike the other apps reviewed here, Chromatic Instrument Tuner from EFRAC can be used not only for guitars, but almost any other instrument (though piano might be a challenge). But for tuning instruments that are not in C (such as trumpet, clarinet, saxophones, etc.), you will need to know the desired note in concert (440 A) tuning. Fortunately, players of these instruments often do this sort of mental transposing, so it should not be a major problem.

For guitarists, it’s much easier. You pluck a string while holding your guitar near the phone. Then the app displays the frequency of the note and the nearest note from the chromatic scale, as well as its frequency, the one you’re presumably shooting for. If there is too much ambient noise, the note is displayed in light grey. Also, the upper part of the screen shows you the difference between your note (the red circle) and the closet note. (Actually, the app records your note, then compares it against its presets.) Below, you can see the results for a B string that is slightly sharp:

While Chromatic Instrument Tuner is the most sophisticated of the apps I tested, it was the one I found most difficult to use. For one, I found I had to be very careful to dampen the guitar’s other five strings…any vibrations, sympathetic or otherwise, ‘confused’ the app, resulting in unclear results. For another, I had to restart the app periodically; while not difficult, that was somewhat annoying. For yet another, because this tuner is not guitar-specific, if my guitar was badly out of tune, the app was easily confused, assuming, for example, that I wanted to tune my G string to G#.

As I mentioned, this app also contains a Tone Generator, another electronic pitch pipe. You set Tone Generator for any note on the chromatic scale, set the length and volume of the note, and let ‘er rip. Below, you can see the screen set for concert A (440 Hz), the standard tuning note for an orchestra:

So which is my favourite? First, I need to say that while these apps are great for playing at home or in other quiet environments, they’re probably not suitable for playing in clubs, studios, metro stations or other noisy places. For the ‘listening’ apps, the ambient sound of other musicians, the audience, or even a nearby jukebox would interfere with their inputs. For the tone generators, I found their volume too low, even when set for Loud, for anyplace other than my quiet office. Also, unlike standalone tuners, Nokia phones don’t have a jack you can plug an electric guitar into, which would bypass the ambient-sound issue.

That said, my favourite of the group is Tunerific Pro. It’s part of the Tunerific package, which is the most expensive of the apps at $9.99. But Tunerific Pro is also, in my opinion, the best. It’s simple, easy, and quick. Plus, you get the 12-tunings tone generator and 300+ chords reference included. What’s more, the Tunerific package is said to run on 60 Nokia device models; you can find a complete list here.

To learn more, you can also watch this Tunerific video:

Two of the Tunerific components can also be purchased separately. Tone Tuner is available on Ovi Store for $1.99. And Guitar Chords, a version of Chords component, also sells separately on Ovi Store for $1.99.

Guitar Tuner works fine and is the cheapest of the bunch at just $0.99.  To learn more, you can watch this video from the developers Pico Brothers:

And the Chromatic Instrument Tuner, the most sophisticated of the group, costs a very reasonable $2.99. What’s more, none of thse apps needs more than 0.6 megabytes of memory storage.

Happy picking!