Organ Tuner

I've used an awful lot of dedicated tuning gear and just about every app. If you tune organs professionally, this app will pay for itself very promptly.

I used this app for the first time last night on a particularly difficult installation that is not only hard to access but is also tuned to a non equal temperament. The Organ Tuner app worked flawlessly for over five hours of nonstop tuning. Easy to read, easy to see, ability to precision tune is incredible. The Celeste tuning feature is excellent. I've never found a system I've been happy with, however, now I can simply dial in the beat rate I weed and the app calculates the appropriate tuning four each note throughout the rank. The ability to adjust for temperature variations in the building is genius and invaluable.

Organ Tuner is invaluable for both normal tuning of finished pipe organs as well as pre-voicing and cutting new pipes to pitch in the voicing room. There are special features that support both usage modes. I have used previous PC versions of Organ Tuner in shop voicing situations. The key iPhone version advantage is its portability when tuning installed organs. I use a velcro carrier strap and wear the tuner on my wrist when tuning in cramped spaces. The Organ Tuner is more accurate than one hears in aural tuning. Tuners experience 'dead bands' when pipes sound in tune but are still marginally out. The Organ Tuner's two displays indicates out of tuneness even after it is heard in tune giving a very solid tuning. My fall tunings tested the iPhone tuner in many situations. Testing included temperature compensation, equal and well-temperaments, single pipe and compound stop tuning, harmonic (mutation) stops, and auto note change. The auto note changing will jump up or down up to four half tones for tuning major third chests. The auto note changing worked in all conditions except for tuning some mixtures where the multiple pitches and harmonics caused some false switching. This was remidied by changing notes manually. In many situations stopping off the mixture pipes was not necessary and tuning could be easily accomplished by switching the partials of the given note. In shop pre-voicing of pipes the Pipe Organ tuner is invaluable due to the high digital accuracy of pitch measurement. I use a spread sheet to take the pipe length and measured cents flat to calculate the amount of pipe length to cut off. The Organ Tuner measurement is so accurate that usually only one or two cutoffs are necessary rather than multiple times with a more conservative triming by ear. High pitches up to the top C of a 61 note 2' stop (8000 Hz) are easily measured. The unique features for the pipe organ make the Organ Tuner an essential tool for my tonal and tuning methodology.