Online Ukulele Tuner

The tuner below is set to ukulele, so it is listening for the four strings of standard GCEA tuning and will name the nearest one along with your error in cents. It suits soprano, concert and tenor ukuleles, which all share the same tuning. Allow microphone access, play one string at a time, and let it ring.

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Standard GCEA tuning

Why the strings are not in order

Look at the table and the ukulele appears wrong: the string closest to your face is higher in pitch than the two below it. That is re-entrant tuning, and it is the reason a ukulele sounds like a ukulele. Instead of a ladder from low to high, all four strings sit inside a single octave, so a strummed chord comes out as a bright cluster rather than a spread with a bass note underneath.

It also changes how chords behave. Because the highest note in a shape is often not on the string you expect, melodies can be played across the strings without moving up the neck, which is where the campanella style comes from. If you have come from guitar and your chords sound thin, this is why: there is no bass string anchoring them, and nothing is broken.

High G and low G

The fourth string is the one people change. High G, the standard, puts it at G4 and 392 Hz, above the C and E strings. Low G swaps it for a wound string an octave down at G3 and 196 Hz, which gives you a real bass string and about four extra notes at the bottom of the range. Fingerstyle players often prefer it. The other three strings stay exactly where they are.

The ukulele preset here expects the high G. If you have fitted a low G string, switch to chromatic mode for that string and tune it to G3 at 196.00 Hz, then use the preset for the other three. You also need a string built for the job: a plain nylon G tuned an octave down will be far too slack to hold pitch or to sound properly.

Baritone ukulele and other sizes

Soprano, concert and tenor ukuleles are all tuned GCEA, so the preset covers all three even though the bodies and scale lengths differ. The baritone is the exception: it is tuned DGBE, the same as the top four strings of a guitar, at D3 146.83 Hz, G3 196.00 Hz, B3 246.94 Hz and E4 329.63 Hz.

There is no baritone preset here, so use chromatic mode and tune to those four note names one string at a time. The same goes for the older D tuning some soprano players use, A D F sharp B, which is the standard shape moved up a whole tone. Chromatic mode names any note between 28 and 2100 Hz, so it handles anything the presets do not.

Nylon strings and why they drift

A new set of ukulele strings will not hold pitch for days. Nylon and fluorocarbon stretch far more than steel, so a fresh string keeps creeping flat, and the honest fix is to tune it, play for a few minutes, and tune it again, repeatedly, until it settles. Gently stretching each string by hand between tunings shortens that to a day or two rather than a week.

Once settled, temperature and humidity are the main cause of drift, and a ukulele responds faster than a guitar because so little tension is holding it together. Give the instrument twenty minutes to reach room temperature if it has come in from the cold, tune the C string first as your reference, and check everything again after the first song.

Where to go next

• Online Tuner: cents readout for guitar, bass, ukulele and violin
• Online Guitar Tuner: the mic tuner preloaded with standard guitar tuning
• Free Online Metronome: 20 to 300 BPM with subdivisions and tap tempo
• Online Tone Generator: one pure tone from 20 Hz to 20 kHz
• Microphone Test: live input level, device specs and a test recording