442 Hz Tuner: Tune Any Instrument to A = 442 Hz
Tuner settings
🎶 Tune by ear 🎶
Our 442 Hz tuner is a free online tuner running at a reference pitch of A = 442 Hz. The reference pitch is the note everything else is measured from: 442 Hz means the A above middle C is tuned to 442 hertz rather than the international standard of 440, and because every other note is calculated from that one A, the whole instrument moves with it. The 442 Hz tuner above is already set, so there is nothing to configure — click Start Tuner, allow your microphone and play a note. It names the note you are closest to and shows how far above or below it you sit, measured against 442 rather than against 440. It is fully chromatic, so it will tune anything you can play into a microphone: guitar, violin, cello, wind instruments, voice. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, and the audio never leaves your device.
Note frequencies at A = 442 Hz
442 Hz sits about 8 cents above 440 Hz, a little under a twelfth of a semitone. That is small enough that nothing about the music changes — same note names, same fingerings — and large enough that an orchestra hears it the instant one player turns up on the wrong reference. Raising the reference lifts every note by that same 8 cents. Here is the octave above middle C at both, 440 Hz first and 442 Hz second:
- C4: 261.63 Hz → 262.81 Hz
- C#4: 277.18 Hz → 278.44 Hz
- D4: 293.66 Hz → 295.00 Hz
- D#4: 311.13 Hz → 312.54 Hz
- E4: 329.63 Hz → 331.13 Hz
- F4: 349.23 Hz → 350.82 Hz
- F#4: 369.99 Hz → 371.68 Hz
- G4: 392.00 Hz → 393.78 Hz
- G#4: 415.30 Hz → 417.19 Hz
- A4: 440.00 Hz → 442.00 Hz
- A#4: 466.16 Hz → 468.28 Hz
- B4: 493.88 Hz → 496.13 Hz
The relationship holds in every octave. Multiply any 440 Hz frequency by 1.00455 and you have its 442 Hz equivalent; divide by the same figure to go back.
Open string frequencies at 442 Hz
If you tune string by string rather than by reading note names, these are your targets at 442 Hz, given from the lowest string upwards:
- Guitar (E A D G B E): 82.78, 110.50, 147.50, 196.89, 248.06, 331.13 Hz
- Bass (E A D G): 41.39, 55.25, 73.75, 98.44 Hz
- Ukulele (G C E A): 393.78, 262.81, 331.13, 442.00 Hz
- Violin (G D A E): 196.89, 295.00, 442.00, 662.25 Hz
- Viola (C G D A): 131.41, 196.89, 295.00, 442.00 Hz
- Cello (C G D A): 65.70, 98.44, 147.50, 221.00 Hz
None of these need a different string gauge or any setup change. Half a hertz on a guitar’s A string is well inside the range the instrument sees between a cold room and a warm one.
Tune your instrument to 442 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. The audio never leaves your device — the analysis runs in your browser.
- Check that the reference reads 442. 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.
- Adjust until the reading settles in the middle, then move to the next string or valve.
- Go round a second time. On anything with strings, tightening one changes the tension on the rest, so the first pass is never the last.
When you play with other people, the only thing that matters is that everybody is on the same reference. An instrument at 442 and an instrument at 440 are each perfectly in tune with themselves, and audibly out of tune with each other.
History of 442 Hz tuning
For most of musical history there was no standard pitch at all. A church organ fixed the pitch of whatever was played alongside it, and organs varied from town to town by as much as a whole tone. A congress of physicists in Stuttgart proposed 440 Hz as early as 1834; France went its own way in 1859 and legislated diapason normal at A = 435; an international conference in London settled on 440 Hz in 1939, and the ISO wrote it down as a standard in 1955.
What the standard did not do was stop the drift. Orchestras have crept upward for two centuries, because a slightly higher pitch reads as brighter and more brilliant, and an ensemble that sits a hair above its neighbours sounds more vivid in the hall. 442 Hz is roughly where that drift settled across much of Europe: high enough to be noticeably brighter than 440, low enough that instruments built for concert pitch cope with it without complaint.
Who tunes to 442 Hz
- European orchestras. 442 Hz is common across concert halls in France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Parts of central Europe sit higher still, closer to 443.
- Japanese orchestras and conservatoires, where 442 Hz is close to a default.
- Wind players. Flutes, oboes and clarinets are built to a nominal pitch, and a great many professional European instruments are cut for 442 or 443. Played at 440 they have to be pulled out further than the maker intended, which costs you intonation across the range rather than just at the tuning note.
- Anyone joining an ensemble that has already decided. If the group tunes to 442, that is the end of the discussion — and this page is the fastest way to get there.
Understand our 442 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 442 Hz tuner
This is the setting the page exists for, and it is already at 442 Hz. The address sets it, which means it takes precedence over anything you have saved before — this page opens at 442 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 /432-hz-tuner, /440-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 442 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 442 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 442 Hz you are chasing a few cents, so a reading that holds still is worth more than one that reacts quickly.
Using our 442 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 442 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 442 Hz too — which is usually what you want if 442 Hz is where you actually work.
If you want to hear 442 Hz rather than read it, our online tuning fork rings at it and our online tone generator will hold any frequency you ask for. To see the exact frequency of a note without any reference pitch involved, use our online pitch detector. And if you would rather tune a specific instrument, start from our guitar tuner or our chromatic tuner.
