insTuner Free - Chromatic Tuner 4+

I love this app! It works very well and it is extremely helpful when tuning something. The only problem is that whenever I was trying to tune the higher notes on my kalimba, it kept thinking I was trying to tune a different note than what I wanted. It was especially difficult to tune the highest note on the kalimba and I ended up destroying my nails by plucking the same tine over and over again. Your nails are what you use to pluck the tines, so it’s a little bit harder to play.

Here’s a tip that may be useful: taking the case off my phone helped. Another thing that sort of helped was playing the note I wanted by switching to the “tone generator” tab and playing the sound I wanted; I turn it off and play the note on my kalimba. It’s a hit or miss: sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I think it helps because it starts to look for that specific note.

Lastly, my suggestion: it would be helpful if you could select a specific note that you are trying to play so it doesn’t get confused with other notes. It would save me a lot of time and it would save my nails :)

Let me just start off my review with a thank. Thank you for making this app! A lot of people need it, and I think it was a wonderful idea to make an app like this! But I have one question that I will get to in a bit. Anyways, I play the viola. After 3rd grade ended, I had the choice to participate in a school orchestra! The instrument choices were the violin, viola, cello, and the bass. As you know, I chose the viola. Once I started playing, my teacher would tune it for me. But as I got more advanced, my teacher showed me a tuning app for any string instrument, and this is it! When the orchestra year of 4th grade ended, I had to give away my school iPad I used this tuner on away to the next 4th graders. And so, the next time I practiced, I downloaded this app! Mainly because my instrument was very out of tune. And then the strangest thing happened. My screen didn’t freeze, but when I started to play my instrument, nothing was happening. But when I clicked some buttons, it apparently wasn’t frozen. So I tried again, and still nothing happened. Plus, my bow wasn’t making any sound. But that has nothing to do with this. Anyways, I tried double clicking and swiping out of all my apps. I even restarted my iPad! My question is, how should I fix this? Should I just redownload the app? Can you please tell my what to do?

It directly tells you whether you need to make the note a higher or lower, and it even has a section where you can play any note from C with an octave of 0 to B with an octave of 8. This is really nice as it allows you to double check if a note is correct, and you can use it if the app can’t pick up a note. It picks up the notes most of the time, though it has some trouble picking up the highest notes on my kalimba at times

The only thing I slightly dislike is that even though it directly tells you whether to tune up or down, the notes are on a circle, which makes it a little confusing (for me personally) which way is tuning up and tuning down. This normally isn’t a problem, except sometimes I need to tune a tine to a completely different note than the one it’s normally tuned to. For example, I have a song where I have to tune the tine that usually plays the note A to play the note F#

That’s not that big of a deal though, so it won’t take a star off of my rating. This is definitely my favorite tuning app for my kalimba and I would highly recommend downloading this!