TonalEnergy Tuner & Metronome

TE tuner is a one stop shop for all practicing needs. It’s got a great and versatile metronome, with a wide selection of metronome sounds, and can provide drones for tuning in any number of timbres and even helps you tune in different temperaments and pitch standards. The tuner is very customizable. It allows you to select how picky the tuner’s range of what it accepts as “in tune” is. I can set it to ultra fine (which only allows one hundredth of a half step on either side of the note as wiggle room) for tuning my strings, then switch to just “fine” if I need to cut myself some slack while practicing scales and intervals. The tuner also has different modes for strings, winds and voice. I don’t know exactly how the modes differ on a technical level, but I’ve found them to work as intended. The user interface is elegantly designed and lays all of this app’s many features out in an intuitively navigable way. This app has become a really helpful resource in my daily practice, and I can’t recommend it enough to musicians at any level.

I have just started using this app and it seems to have the main functions I was looking to consolidate from multiple other apps I use - mainly a metronome and a piano keyboard to give me notes to work through vocal practices / figure out harmonies. Also was looking for an app to buy, rather than a free app, because the ads in the free apps get annoying (and seem to be getting worse, e.g. making you watch 5 seconds of a commercial before it allows you to close it). And this one has a tuner to boot. I do have 2 suggestions: 1) Call me crazy, but if I’m just giving myself a note to sing from, I’d love it if the piano keyboard display had the option to sound like a piano. You can make it sound like a whole bunch of different instruments, many with kind of cheesy tones, but piano is not one of them. 2) Would like a mute button on the metronome, such that when in the metronome page, you can see the box (or the screen) flashing the time but without the click. I can accomplish this by turning down the volume on the side of my phone, but it takes a lot of pushes to do that so it can’t be done quickly. Otherwise I do like this app.

This app was highly recommended by a friend, he had used it in our vocal rehearsals to give us pitches and tempos. I bought it to try and consolidate all the functions I need in to one app. Initially I found the tuner very jumpy, and I don't like the smiley face with concentric half circles tuning model at all, so I wrote a pretty harsh review. The developer contacted me and pointed out the string tuning mode, which I initially couldn't find because it's not in the tuning section; it's under the sound tab. It makes it much easier to tune my guitar (and it has setting for many stringed instruments from viola to banjo) but if I try to sing long tones or play them on my trumpet, I'm back in the happy face tuner. In theory it should work but to me, the slightest pitch change in a long tone causes the rings to jump erratically. I think that the string mode rescued the app from deletion, and added one star to my rating, but I will still sing and play long tones into the free "pano tuner" rather than deal with the unhappy happy faces. Kudos to the developer for helping me find my way around the app. One more quick gripe, if I'm singing with the metronome playing, the app hears the click and reacts to it, so you essentially can't tune with the metronome on.