Steady Pitch, a vocal pitch monitor and trainer in one file, one price

One price, once. There is nothing to buy inside, no subscription, no account, and no second till waiting for you after the first.

You get one HTML file. Double click it and it opens in your browser. It runs with the internet switched off, and nothing you sing leaves your machine because there is nothing to send it to. Copy it to another computer, keep it on a memory stick, open it in three years. There is no server that can go away and no login that can lock you out of something you have already paid for.

I am labouring this point because it is what people write about most when a practice tool disappoints them. Pay to get in, pay again inside for what you actually wanted, and one day it stops recognising what you bought.

IT FITS YOUR VOICE, NOT THREE BROAD BOXES

Choose bass, baritone, tenor, alto, mezzo, soprano or child, and the whole course transposes to your range. Seven, not three, and every one of the thirty exercises moves with you.

Concert pitch is yours to set. If your ensemble tunes to 442, tell it so. A trainer locked to 440 would call you eight cents sharp on every single note, forever, and blame you for it.

WHAT YOU DO

Pick your range. Sing or play what the screen shows. Watch the marker settle and see your error in cents, the unit real musicians use.

Thirty exercises, six levels, in the order voices actually learn. Level 1 gives you two notes and asks you to sing them until they are solid. Level 2 adds one note. By level 4 you have the full five note scale with no half steps, so nothing is out of reach yet. Half steps arrive at level 5, once you can hold a note, because they are the hardest thing to sing in tune and there is no reason to fail at them on day one. Level 6 opens up to leaps, arpeggios and the octave. That order is not mine, it is the sequence music teachers have used for eighty years, and it works because it never asks for two new difficulties at once.

Tolerance is generous at first and tightens as you improve. A beginner is not told they are wrong for being fifteen cents off, because they are not wrong, they are learning.

AND IT ACTUALLY HEARS YOU

This is the part I would rather you check than believe, which is why the free file exists.

Pitch detection on the human voice is harder than on a guitar string. The voice carries strong harmonics that fool simple detectors into hearing the wrong octave, and every singer slides a little into a note before settling on it. Steady Pitch ignores the slide and grades the part you actually held, and it knows which note the exercise asked for, so it can never report you an octave away.

Measured on recordings of real singers, not synthetic tones. Across forty tracks, twenty nine singers and nine languages, it read the sung pitch correctly on 93.1 percent of the 23,192 voiced frames. On a second and unrelated set of seventy seven sung notes, all seventy seven verdicts were right.

Test material from the open vocadito dataset, used under CC BY 4.0, and from the vocobox human voice dataset, used under the MIT licence.

IT ALSO LISTENS TO INSTRUMENTS

Play instead of sing and the same engine grades you. On a real piano at full sampling rate, forty seven notes, zero errors. On guitar through a microphone, 98.8 percent on isolated sustained notes. Across fourteen orchestral instruments, 98.5 percent, between C2 and C6.

Those last two carry their conditions on purpose. Isolated sustained notes were 5.5 percent of the notes in that recording set, and below 65 Hz the engine tells you it cannot hear rather than guessing. I would rather you know where it stops than discover it mid practice.

USABLE WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE SCREEN

Every verdict is spoken in plain words, with no symbols a screen reader would mangle. Guidance is audio and haptic and it goes quiet when you are in tune, so silence means you are right. A pitch trainer should be fully usable by a musician who cannot see, and this one is.

Six languages, and four ways of naming notes, including movable do and the German H. If you were taught do re mi, you are not forced into C D E.

TRY IT FIRST

The free file on this same store is not a teaser. Same engine, same accuracy, same six languages, same accessibility. It holds level 1, five exercises, and that is the only difference.

FOR TEACHERS

If you teach voice, choir or musicianship, this is the thing you can hand a student for the week between lessons. It grades the one thing you cannot check when you are not in the room. Send them the free file, it opens in their browser with nothing to install and no account to make.

WHAT IT NEEDS

A microphone, and a browser from the last few years. It asks for the microphone once, when you start, and the light goes out when you leave.