Have you ever wondered why we use the tuning that we do?

Have you ever wondered what other tunings there are?

Have you ever wondered what effect other tunings would have on your music?

Alt-tuner is a DAW plug-in that retunes almost every midi keyboard or softsynth. It runs on PCs, macs and Linux/Wine machines. Click here to buy it. Alt-tuner combines ease of use with powerful capabilities:

Recreate historical tunings like pythagorean, meantone and well-temperaments.

Stretch your piano tuning -- create your own Railsback curves.

Explore ethnic tunings like Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Indonesian.

Investigate experimental tunings like 22 notes to the octave.

Or just use the adaptive just intonation feature to make "normal" music sound smoother!

You don't need to know tuning theory to get started. Well-chosen defaults get you playing right away. Alt-tuner is novice-friendly and encourages "stumbling onto" new tunings. Alt-tuner uses a graphical point-and-click interface, making it very easy to explore. You're moving sliders and clicking on things, not typing in commands and numbers. Alt-tuner is to other tuning software like Windows is to MS-DOS. However as you explore alt-tuner, many advanced mathematical concepts are demonstrated in a way that can be immediately seen and heard. The manual even includes a 120-page primer on tuning theory (read the outline here). Alt-tuner is so easy to use that it doubles as an educational tool!

You control alt-tuner not only with mouse clicks but also with foot pedals, keyswitches, knobs, sliders, or almost anymidi message your equipment can send. This lets you retune as you play, allowing for extreme modulations, adaptive tuning, multiple EDOs in one piece, etc. You can program your pedals and keyswitches so that you can switch to an entirely different tuning instantly with a single foot press, allowing you to concentrate on the playing, not the tuning process. You can even retune notes you've already played via the retroactive retuning window.

Alt-tuner gives immediate visual feedback on your tuning with an interval display and with lattice, graph and table views (see the screenshots gallery). For non-octave and/or non-12 tunings, you have full control over the keyboard layout, with automatic naming of every key by letter & accidental (e.g. F#) and of every interval by quality & degree (e.g. minor 3rd). You can even create your own symbols for both note names and accidentals.

Because alt-tuner is a DAW plug-in, it's completely integrated with the recording process. You can fully control tuning changes over the course of your recording using either embedded midi or envelope automation. No composition is too complex to record.

Alt-tuner can retune multiple synths at once, with each player retuning their own synth, or one player retuning everyone. Start a band!

Guitarists, bassists and violinists: While alt-tuner can't retune your instrument directly, you can use JamOrigin's software to convert your analog audio to midi, alt-tuner can tune this midi, and the tuned midi can play a synth or a sampler.

Soundfont users: SF2 format soundfonts can be easily retuned using Xen-Arts's free soundfont player, XenFont.

Modular synth users: Mutable Instruments' Yarns midi-to-CV converter works with alt-tuner in either pitch bend mode or sysex88 mode, allowing real-time microtuning of CV synths (untested, but the Mutable Instruments people say it should work). Another possibility is using Native Instruments' Reaktor, which is confirmed to work with alt-tuner, and which can function as a midi-to-CV converter. Reaktor can send CV out your laptop's ADAT audio port to Expert Sleepers' ES-3 interface, which can convert the digital CV to analog CV. A third possibility is Sequentix's Cirklon sequencer, which has 8 tuning tables that respond to alt-tuner's sysex82 mode.