PitchLab Lite

PitchLab may present itself as a guitar tuner, but it can do a lot more than that in practice. This is one of the best musical tuners around, and its functions make it an incredibly useful tool for everything from keyboards to traditional stringed instruments like violins and cellos. While the Lite version isn't as in depth as PitchLab Pro, it's still an impressive piece of work, and the fact that it can run on the mobile devices that most musicians are carrying with them anyway only increases the utility of this app. While you might not use it everyday, it's the sort of sensible app that musicians of all stripes can be confident installing on their phone.

There are a wealth of features in PitchLab, and while many of them may seem built for the technical demands of more experienced users, the interface is so intuitive and easy to use that even the greenest novices can get an understanding of what this app offers with just a few minutes experience.

Just keep in mind that having access to one of the best tuners on the market doesn't come without a price tag. While users can use some of the more basic functions without having to pay a dime, the vast majority of utilities here are locked behind a pay wall. Fortunately, it's very affordably priced, and you can get all of the additional features for a single payment rather than having to sign up for any sort of subscription plan. Free users can just access the stage tuner, a traditional approach to tuning that utilizes a large display and is designed to be used hands free. It's accurate and simple to use, but it's just scratching the surface of what PitchLab has to offer.

It's the four other visualizations that really make the experience here pop, and many musicians will be excited to find that PitchLab comes with a strobe tuner - a real rarity in the overcrowded market of tuners built for mobile devices. It works exceedingly well, making use of six bands and a chromatic ribbon to display meaningful and easily digestible results about your instrument's performance. This tuner is bolstered by the inclusion of a chord matrix and pitch spectogram. A strobe tuner further rounds out the package. Shifting between the different visualizations is as simple as swiping the screen with your finger, but even cooler is the ability to drop into split screen mode and view two separate visualizations at the same time. All of these visualizations are built with the demands of musicians in mind, and they work incredibly well without having to keep your hands on your mobile device.

Pros:

• Easily one of the most fully featured and intuitive instrument tuners on the market
• Supports a vast range of keyed and stringed instruments
• Dual screen mode lets you tune using multiple visual cues as a guide

Cons:

• No longer being supported for some platforms
• Best features locked behind a pay wall

1.0.22: Maintenance update.