Cuatro tuner

Venezuelan cuatro tuning in Hz

Puerto Rican cuatro tuning in Hz

At A4 = 440 Hz; the reference switch above moves them all. Top and bottom as you hold the cuatro to play.

How to tune a cuatro: Venezuelan or Puerto Rican

Pick your cuatro on the switch: Venezuelan for four strings, Puerto Rican for ten. Tap start and play the string the tuner asks for, beginning with the top one, nearest your chin. Let it ring: the needle shows how far off it is and the tuner says tighten or loosen. At five cents or closer a tick comes and the next string is asked for; on the Puerto Rican cuatro the tuner asks for each pair once. Tap a string's button to tune it out of order or, with the microphone off, to hear its note.

Two instruments share the name, and their tunings have nothing in common, so set the switch first. Four nylon strings, A D F♯ B, is the Venezuelan cuatro, also played in the llanos of Colombia and in Trinidad's parang. Ten steel strings in five pairs, B E A D G, is the Puerto Rican cuatro, the island's national instrument.

Venezuelan cuatro tuning: A D F♯ B (La Re Fa♯ Si)

From the top string down: A3, D4, F♯4, then B3. The cuatro is re-entrant: the bottom string, B3, is lower than the F♯ and the D above it, between the A and the D in pitch. If it rings higher than the F♯, it is an octave too high and will break. The tuner reads the note's name and folds octaves, so it can't catch that for you; tap the B button with the microphone off and match the lower B. Strummed open, the four strings sound a B minor seventh, the same notes as D6.

Method books number the strings both ways, some from the B and some from the A, so go by the note and where the string sits. Ukulele chord shapes carry over: a ukulele in C tuning, G C E A, is the cuatro's pattern a whole step lower, so a ukulele G shape is an A on the cuatro and a C shape is a D.

Puerto Rican cuatro tuning: 10 strings, B E A D G

The Puerto Rican cuatro has five courses, so it is also called the five-string cuatro: ten strings in five pairs, in fourths from the top: B, E, A, D, G. The two top pairs are octave pairs, a thick B2 with a thin B3 and a thick E3 with a thin E4; the A, D and G pairs are unisons. Tune the thick string of a pair first, then its partner. Because the tuner folds octaves, both strings of an octave pair read against the same note, so check the thin one by ear: it should match the thick string at the 12th fret. The E, A, D and G pairs sound an octave above a guitar's four thickest strings, so guitar shapes on those strings carry over.

Tuning a cuatro without a tuner

Venezuelan: get the A from a reference, the tone generator at 220 Hz or a piano. The A string at the 5th fret is the open D; the D string at the 4th fret is the open F♯; the A string at the 2nd fret is the open low B. Puerto Rican: get the low B (123.47 Hz), then the 5th fret of each pair is the next open pair, B to E, E to A, A to D, D to G. Play the fretted note and the open string together and turn until the wobble stops.

Cuatro strings, and why a new set drifts

The Venezuelan cuatro takes nylon strings, and nylon stretches for days: tune, play, and tune again until it holds. The Puerto Rican cuatro takes steel strings, the thick ones of the low pairs wound, and ten of them pull hard on the neck: bring a new set up a little at a time across all the pairs rather than one pair to full pitch. On either cuatro, a string tuned far above its note doesn't just sound wrong, it breaks.

No app or APK to install: this tuner runs in the phone's browser. A clip-on or app tuner works too if it is chromatic and set to chromatic mode, since cuatro notes aren't a guitar preset.

The notes you tuned go into Brumm as a short melody over a beat.