MusicReasonPitch, Tuning, Intonation, and Fret Geometry
What does this tuning actually give me?
Choose a Locked tuning profile. This tool shows every open string's pitch, the interval between each adjacent pair of strings, and the tuning's overall low-to-high range. It makes no recommendation for any specific player or instrument setup.
Answer
Want to learn more? Fretboards, Tunings, Capos, and Sounding Pitch
Understand
A tuning is fully described by its open-string pitches alone; everything else, including the interval between adjacent strings and the instrument's total range, follows directly from those pitches. Standard 6-string guitar tuning is mostly perfect fourths between strings, with one deliberate major-third exception between the G and B strings, a detail that changes many common chord shapes compared to a fully-fourths tuning.
Worked examples
Standard 6-string tuning is E2, A2, D3, G3, B3, E4, low to high. On any tuning, the interval from a string's open pitch to that same string's 12th fret is always exactly one octave, a fixed geometric fact of equal-tempered fret placement that holds regardless of which tuning is selected.
Method and limitations
Every string's sounding pitch at a given fret is its own open MIDI pitch plus the fret number, the identical formula Fretboard Note Explorer uses; string-to-string intervals are simply the difference between each pair of adjacent open pitches. Only the tunings in the Locked launch vocabulary are supported here; a custom open-pitch entry is validated to be strictly ascending from low string to high string before being accepted, since a tuning where a higher string sounds lower than the one before it is not a coherent open-string configuration this tool can represent. This tool describes sounding pitch only and makes no recommendation about which tuning suits a particular player, genre, or setup.
Drop D tuning changes exactly one string's open pitch from standard tuning, lowering the low E string a whole step to D, which reshapes only the interval between that string and its immediate neighbor while leaving every other adjacent-string interval untouched. A 7-string tuning adds one additional low string below the standard six, extending the range downward without altering the relationships among the original six strings at all.