Sine Tuner

A small program for tuning a guitar's open strings to pure sine wave tones.

Overview

This program runs a small UI application that consists of six different buttons each corresponding to the open string notes on a guitar (in standard tuning).

Only a single tone plays at once. Clicking a button will cause that note's sine tone to start playing. If you click the same button again it will mute the tone. Clicking to other buttons will switch the tone.

The low E string tone is in the top row and high E string tone is in the bottom row.

I cover the development process for this project on my site here if you're interested.

Motivation

I usually tune my guitar by ear using a 440 hz tone. This is pretty common since 440 hz is a standard pitch for tuning many instruments. However, I wanted an easy way to tune each of the open strings on a guitar by ear using pure sine tones. Plus, it sounded like a fun project to dig deeper into audio processing.

Thus, this sine tuner program was born. Its pretty basic, but I learned a lot building it. I don't have much UI programming experience, so going into this project I decided to use immediate mode style implementation for the UI. It felt like a more natural approach and was easy enough to implement myself.

Building

The main dependency for this program is SDL. I use SDL to handle both graphics and audio processing. I also made use of the stb libraries, specifically stb_truetype.h for the font rendering. That header is included with this project so no need to download it separately.

You'll need to install SDL if you don't already have it to build this project. You can download SDL here. gcc or clang is also needed to handle compilation. Once SDL is installed you can build and run the program with the following:

git clone https://github.com/dan-sf/sine-tuner.git
cd sine-tuner
./build.sh
./sine_tuner

This program was built and tested on MacOS. It should theoretically work on Windows and Linux if SDL is installed. However, this hasn't been tested so your mileage may vary.

The lower tones can be difficult to hear on some speakers so headphones or earbuds are best for clarity.