432 Hz Tuner: Tune Any Instrument to A = 432 Hz
Tuner settings
🎶 Tune by ear 🎶
Our 432 Hz tuner is a free online tuner running at a reference pitch of A = 432 Hz. The reference pitch is the note everything else is measured from: 432 Hz puts the A above middle C eight hertz below the international standard of 440, and because every other note is calculated from that one A, the whole instrument comes down with it. The 432 Hz tuner above is already set, so there is nothing to configure — click Start Tuner, allow your microphone and play a note, and it will name the nearest note and show how many cents sharp or flat you are against 432. It is fully chromatic, so it will tune anything you can play into a microphone, from a guitar to a violin to your own voice. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, and the audio never leaves your device.
Note frequencies at A = 432 Hz
432 Hz sits about 32 cents below 440 Hz — roughly a third of a semitone, and much the largest departure from concert pitch of the common alternative references. It is unmistakable: play the same piece at 432 and at 440 and anyone will hear that one of them is lower, even if they cannot say why. Every note drops by that same 32 cents. Here is the octave above middle C, at 440 Hz and then at 432 Hz:
- C4: 261.63 Hz → 256.87 Hz
- C#4: 277.18 Hz → 272.14 Hz
- D4: 293.66 Hz → 288.33 Hz
- D#4: 311.13 Hz → 305.47 Hz
- E4: 329.63 Hz → 323.63 Hz
- F4: 349.23 Hz → 342.88 Hz
- F#4: 369.99 Hz → 363.27 Hz
- G4: 392.00 Hz → 384.87 Hz
- G#4: 415.30 Hz → 407.75 Hz
- A4: 440.00 Hz → 432.00 Hz
- A#4: 466.16 Hz → 457.69 Hz
- B4: 493.88 Hz → 484.90 Hz
For any other octave, multiply the 440 Hz frequency by 0.98182. One number in that list is worth a second look: C4 comes out at 256.87 Hz. 432 Hz is often promoted on the grounds that it makes C exactly 256 Hz, a clean power of two, and that is true of a Pythagorean or just-intonation scale — but not of the equal temperament every modern guitar is fretted for and every piano is tuned to. On this tuner, and on your instrument, A = 432 Hz gives C = 256.87 Hz.
Open string frequencies at 432 Hz
Tuning string by string, these are the targets at 432 Hz, lowest string first:
- Guitar (E A D G B E): 80.91, 108.00, 144.16, 192.43, 242.45, 323.63 Hz
- Bass (E A D G): 40.45, 54.00, 72.08, 96.22 Hz
- Ukulele (G C E A): 384.87, 256.87, 323.63, 432.00 Hz
- Violin (G D A E): 192.43, 288.33, 432.00, 647.27 Hz
- Viola (C G D A): 128.43, 192.43, 288.33, 432.00 Hz
- Cello (C G D A): 64.22, 96.22, 144.16, 216.00 Hz
Everything sits about a third of a semitone slacker than standard. A normal set of strings copes with that easily — if anything it asks less of the instrument than tuning up does — but a very light set can start to feel loose and buzz against the frets, and players who keep an instrument at 432 permanently often move up one gauge.
Tune your instrument to 432 Hz
- Find a quiet spot and put your instrument near the device’s microphone.
- Click Start Tuner and allow microphone access when the browser asks. Nothing is recorded or uploaded — the pitch analysis runs in your browser.
- Check that the reference reads 432. This page sets it for you, so it should already be there.
- Play one note at a time and let it ring rather than damping it. The tuner names the nearest note and shows how far above or below it you are, in cents.
- Slacken each string until the reading centres, working from the lowest upwards.
- Go round a second time. Releasing tension on one string lets the others rise slightly, so the first pass is never the last.
Because 432 Hz is below concert pitch you are loosening every string, and a string dropped onto its note from above tends to creep back sharp. Go a little under your target and come back up to it: arriving from below leaves the string settled, and the tuning will hold far longer.
History of 432 Hz tuning
For most of musical history there was no standard pitch at all — the local organ fixed it, and organs varied from one town to the next by as much as a whole tone. Pitch then crept steadily upward through the nineteenth century, because a brighter-sounding orchestra was a more impressive one, and singers were the ones paying for it.
That is where 432 Hz comes from. France legislated diapason normal at A = 435 Hz in 1859 to stop the drift. In 1884 the Italian government, urged on by Giuseppe Verdi, decreed A = 432 Hz for Italian orchestras — which is why you will still see it called Verdi tuning. Verdi’s argument was entirely practical: the pitch had risen far enough to push his singers past the top of their range. The 440 Hz that eventually won was agreed in London in 1939 and written into ISO 16 in 1955.
The modern following for 432 Hz has almost nothing to do with Verdi. It grew up around claims that the frequency is somehow more natural, or better matched to the human body, and those claims do not hold up. What does hold up, and is reason enough on its own, is that a lower reference sounds warmer and less strident, and a great many musicians simply prefer it.
Who tunes to 432 Hz
- Ambient, meditation and new-age musicians, by a wide margin the largest group, and the reason most 432 Hz material on streaming services exists.
- Acoustic guitarists and singer-songwriters who find the slacker strings softer under the fingers and the warmer tone better suited to a quiet room.
- Singers. A third of a semitone off the top of a range is a real difference when a song sits at the edge of what you can reach.
- Anyone playing along to a 432 Hz recording, where retuning your instrument is a great deal easier than retuning the track.
Understand our 432 Hz tuner’s settings
The tuner above is our full chromatic tuner with the reference pitch already set for you. The first settings sit beside the tuner; the rest are behind Advanced settings.
The reference pitch of our 432 Hz tuner
This is the setting the page exists for, and it is already at 432 Hz. The address sets it, which means it takes precedence over anything you have saved before — this page opens at 432 Hz even if your usual reference is something else. You are not locked to it: type another value in the box or drag the slider and every note recomputes as you move. Any three digits followed by -hz in the address work the same way, so /440-hz-tuner, /442-hz-tuner and /444-hz-tuner open at those references, and /guitar-tuner/432-hz combines a reference pitch with an instrument.
Choose which microphone our 432 Hz tuner listens to
If your device has more than one input — a built-in microphone, a headset, an audio interface with your instrument plugged straight into it — pick the right one from the microphone list before you start. A direct signal from an interface is far steadier than a laptop microphone picking your instrument up across the room.
Set the sensitivity of our 432 Hz tuner
The confidence threshold decides how sure the detection algorithm has to be before it commits to a note. Raise it and the tuner ignores everything it is not certain about: fewer readings, but the ones you get are trustworthy. Lower it and it will follow a quieter or messier signal, at the cost of the occasional wrong note. Working at 432 Hz you are chasing a few cents, so a reading that holds still is worth more than one that reacts quickly.
Using our 432 Hz tuner in a noisy room
The noise gate sets a volume below which the tuner does not listen at all. Air conditioning, traffic, someone else practising in the next room — anything under the threshold is discarded before the pitch analysis runs. Raise it until the readout falls quiet when you stop playing, and leave it there.
Meter tuner or slider tuner
A matter of taste rather than accuracy. The Display the slider tuner switch swaps the needle for a horizontal slider; both read the same pitch to the same precision. Players tuning by feel tend to prefer the needle, players watching for drift over a long note tend to prefer the slider.
Save the settings of our 432 Hz tuner
Save settings stores your reference pitch, microphone, sensitivity, noise gate and display choice for next time. Reset settings puts all of them back to default. Note that the saved reference pitch applies across the site, so if you save here, our other tuners will open at 432 Hz too — which is usually what you want if 432 Hz is where you actually work.
If you specifically want to tune a guitar to this reference, our 432 Hz guitar tuner is the same tuner with the six standard strings already loaded. To hear 432 Hz rather than read it, our online tuning fork has it as a preset and our online tone generator will hold it for as long as you like. Our online pitch detector shows the raw frequency of whatever you play, with no reference pitch applied at all. For other instruments, start from our chromatic tuner.
