Guide

Nitpitch is built to explain itself, so this page is less a manual than a tour: what each screen is for, and what the states you’ll see actually mean. Everything here applies to iPhone, iPad, and Mac alike; the few places the Mac differs are marked. The watch has its own page — same ideas, different hands.

The launch screen

The app opens on the chromatic tuner: play anything and it names the nearest note, with the error in cents. Below it sit your instruments — starred ones lead, each with one-tap chips for its pinned presets — and two doors: All instruments… and All presets….

“Play a note” means the tuner is listening but nothing confident is sounding. It is deliberately picky: bow noise, room rumble, and the gap between notes are filtered out rather than shown, so when a number appears you can trust it. If it says this while you’re playing, get closer to the microphone or pluck a little harder.

Reading the readout

The note name is the nearest note; the cents say how far you are from it — negative is flat, positive is sharp, and ±5¢ counts as in tune (that’s when things turn green). The dot strip below is the same story at a glance: the lit dot walks outward as the error grows, doubling its distance per dot, and the centre dot means done. For the last fraction of a cent, the strobe band shows error as motion — crawling right is sharp, left is flat, standing still is true.

An instrument: a dial per string

Choose an instrument and every string gets its own dial, lit only by pitches near its own target — so a wildly flat string still lights its dial, not a neighbour’s. Bow or pluck two adjacent strings at once and the interval chip appears: the pulse rate it shows is the beating you hear between the strings’ shared harmonics, and it stills exactly as the interval comes true. That is how violinists tune fifths, rendered on screen.

The string view

Tap a dial to work on one string: a big dial, the target note with − / + steppers (nudging a target relabels the tuning Custom — the name follows the pitches), a speaker to sound the reference tone, and the strobe band. Swipe sideways or use the arrows to walk strings.

The screen follows your playing: it walks to the string you’re actually playing — a brushed neighbour never steals it, only a string played on purpose, and a sympathetic ring (an unmuted string singing along) never qualifies — and it never jumps while you’re mid-turn on a peg, because working the current string holds it. When a string has held in tune a moment, the target turns green — done — and the screen advances to the next string almost immediately once you play it. A swipe or arrow always wins over the walk.

Harmonics

Touching a string’s node instead of playing it open — the 12th-fret harmonic, or the 7th-fret one — works without any mode: the error shown is still the string’s own, and the readout says · 2nd harmonic or · 3rd harmonic so the screen and your ear agree about what’s sounding. Where a harmonic is genuinely ambiguous between two strings (on a violin, D’s 3rd harmonic is the A’s octave), the tuner stays silent rather than guessing.

The intonation check

For fretted instruments’ setup work — the chip appears on fretted instruments only, right where bowed ones carry their temperament chip instead. Tuning and checking intonation are two different jobs, so the check is started deliberately: tap the Intonation chip in the footer — it sits beside the reference on both the grid and the single-string screen, and one tap switches both. On the watch, the same check starts from the Δ button beside the tuning name. Then play a string open, then at the 12th fret (or its harmonic). Each sample locks once it has held — a wobbly attack or a stray resonance can’t pollute it — and the Δ is the verdict: how far the octave sits from where the open string promises it. Positive means the octave is sharp; on a guitar, the saddle wants to move back. Re-play either note after an adjustment and the newer sample simply replaces the older; tap the chip again (or leave the instrument) to go back to plain tuning.

Presets and pins

A preset is a setup under your name — pitches, and optionally the reference and temperament it was saved with. The built-in tunings (Drop D, DADGAD, Open G…) arrive as ordinary presets: rename, delete, share, or pin them like your own. A pin binds a preset to one instrument as a launch-screen chip — instrument and setup, one tap. In any preset list, the ⊜ mark shows the row you’re already on: tapping it would change nothing.

Sharing a preset gives a link and a QR code carrying the whole setup — strings, reference, temperament. Nothing but the setup travels, and never through any server of ours.

Reference and temperament

The reference steps a hertz at a time, A=390 through 466 — 440 by default, 442–443 for many European orchestras, 415 for baroque. Temperament decides how string targets divide their intervals: pure fifths is the default on bowed instruments, because beatless fifths tuned by ear are pure; everywhere else it’s equal, the temperament frets are cast in. Each instrument carries its own reference and temperament; the chromatic tuner’s A lives in Settings.

iCloud sync

Off by default — nothing leaves your device until you flip it. On, your instruments, presets, and favorites stay the same on every device signed into your iCloud, merged setting by setting: two devices edited apart both keep their changes, an unstar sticks everywhere, and a fresh device adopts your existing setup instead of announcing its factory state. Audio is never part of it; there is no server of ours.

On the Mac

Everything above, plus: an audio interface or DI beats any microphone — plug an electric instrument straight in for the cleanest signal the detector will ever see. Escape walks up a level, the keyboard’s answer to the phone’s edge swipe. And in a wide window the grid can show strips instead of dials — a Settings toggle, with the low string at the bottom or the top as you prefer.