Free online tuning drone

A drone is a sustained pitch, held without change for as long as you need it. Bagpipes have drone pipes, Indian classical music has the tanpura, and every string player who has tuned to an oboe’s A has used one. As a practice tool the idea is simple: sound a steady note and play against it, and every interval you produce is measured against something that does not move. Below is what a drone does for your intonation, how the reference pitch works and why orchestras disagree about it, how to tune to a drone, and the exercises players and singers use with one.

What a drone does for your intonation

Intonation is relative. There is no way to feel that a note is a few cents sharp from inside your own playing; you can only hear it against another pitch. A drone supplies that other pitch and holds it perfectly still, so any drift in your own note shows up as beating, a pulsing wobble in the combined sound. Slow beating means you are close; fast beating means you are further away; no beating means the two pitches match, or form a pure interval. Practicing with a drone trains you to hear that beating and to adjust until it stops, which is exactly the skill an ensemble player uses every time the harmony changes. The tuner tells you whether one note is right; the drone teaches you to hear whether it is right, which is what you have to do on stage.

Reference pitch: 440, 442 and the rest

A drone is only a reference if everyone agrees on the reference. The international standard puts A above middle C at 440 Hz, and that is what this tool uses unless you change it. Many orchestras tune a little higher, to 441, 442 or 443 Hz, because a slightly higher pitch sounds brighter; if you play in one, set the drone to match or you will be flat against your colleagues. Baroque ensembles playing on period instruments usually tune to A = 415, almost exactly a semitone below modern pitch, so their instruments and strings are under less tension. You may also meet 432 Hz, which has no historical basis but is occasionally requested. Whatever the reference, every other note follows from it: raise A from 440 to 442 and every note on the drone rises by the same fraction, about 0.8%.

Which notes the instruments tune to

Some notes matter more than others because instruments have open strings on them. The table lists the common tuning notes and the octave they sound in, so you can set the drone to the right register.

How to tune to a drone

Set the drone to the note and octave of the string you are tuning, then play the string and listen to the two together. If you hear a slow pulse, you are close; turn the peg a little in one direction and listen again. If the pulse speeds up you went the wrong way; if it slows down, keep going until it stops and the two sounds fuse into one. Tune each string this way rather than tuning one string to the drone and the rest to each other, because small errors add up across the instrument. For a quicker answer on a single string, the guitar tuner listens to you and shows the offset in cents; the drone is for training the ear that the tuner replaces.

Practicing over a drone

Once your instrument is in tune, the drone becomes an intonation coach. Start with long tones on the drone note itself: hold it, listen for beating, and correct until the sound is still, then do the same an octave above and below. Next play the fifth above the drone, then the fourth, then the major third, listening for each to lock in — the fifth and octave should sound perfectly calm, and you will hear that a third has a narrow range in which it sounds sweet. Then play a scale slowly over the drone, one note per bow or breath, pausing on each degree to hear how it sits against the root. Use the scale finder to see the notes of any scale before you play them, and the interval finder to name what you are hearing. Finally play a melody you know over the drone in its key, and notice which notes want to be adjusted slightly to sound in tune against the sustained root.

Add a fifth

A single note gives you one reference; a root and its fifth give you a small chord that defines the key. This tool adds the fifth as a pure interval, tuned in the ratio 3:2 rather than to the piano’s slightly narrow equal-tempered fifth, so it sounds completely still against the root, the way a tanpura’s strings or a bagpipe’s drones do. Over that pair, thirds and sevenths reveal their character more clearly, and a scale sounds like music rather than an exercise. Turn it on for melodic practice and off when you are tuning a single string.

Drones for singers

Singers cannot see their pitch on an instrument, so a drone is one of the most useful tools they have. Warm up on the drone note with a hum, then move to a fifth and an octave above it, listening for the beating to stop. Sing scales and arpeggios over the drone in a comfortable key, then in a harder one, and sing a phrase of a song against the drone on its tonic to feel where the melody leans on the key. A drone in the octave below your voice is easiest to hear against; the pad sound is gentler for long sessions than the organ.

Choosing the sound and the octave

The three sounds serve different jobs. The pad is warm and slightly detuned, like a distant string section, and sits comfortably under long practice. The organ has clear harmonics, which makes beating easier to hear when you are tuning a string. The pure tone is a plain sine wave, useful when you want nothing but the fundamental to compare against. For the octave, put the drone near the register you play in: cello, bass and guitar players usually want the second or third octave, violinists, singers and wind players the third or fourth. A drone far below your note is easier to hear beating against; one in your own register is closer to how you will hear yourself in an ensemble.

A short history of the drone

The drone is older than harmony. Bagpipes carry one or more drone pipes that sound the tonic beneath the melody, the hurdy-gurdy has drone strings that its wheel bows continuously, and the tanpura of Indian classical music does nothing else: four strings, tuned to the tonic and its fifth, plucked in a slow cycle for the whole performance so that every note the singer or sitarist plays is heard against the key. Medieval and Renaissance music used sustained pedal points in the same way, and organists still hold a bass note under changing chords for the same effect. When string teachers began recording albums of sustained cello and viola tones for students to practice against, they were rediscovering a very old idea: intonation is easiest to learn against a note that never moves.

Common mistakes

The first is tuning to the wrong octave. A drone an octave away from your string still beats, but faintly and slowly, so it is easy to think you are in tune when you are not; match the octave the string actually sounds in. The second is playing too loud. Beating is a quiet effect, and if your own note drowns the drone you cannot hear it; play softly enough that the two blend. The third is vibrato: it hides pitch, so tune and hold long tones with a straight sound and add vibrato only once the center of the note is secure. The last is leaning on a tuner’s needle instead of your ear. A tuner is right for a quick check, but the whole point of drone practice is to hear intonation yourself, so keep the tuner out of sight while the drone is on.

Using it with the other tools

The drone pairs naturally with the rest of the practice tools. Tune each string with the guitar tuner, then check the whole instrument against a drone on A or E. Look up a scale in the scale finder, play it over the drone on its root, and name the intervals you hear with the interval finder. Train your ear on chord qualities with the chord ear trainer, then hear the same qualities as you play thirds and sevenths over the drone. Once the intonation is solid, the metronome takes over to make the same passage steady in time as well as in pitch.

Practice tips

• Tune every string to the drone directly; do not tune strings to each other.
• Hold each long tone until the beating stops before moving to the next note.
• Practice scales slowly over a drone in the key of the piece you are learning, not only in easy keys.
• Record yourself over the drone with the Pro tab of the metronome and listen back for the notes that drift.