An alto, an octave down
A baritone saxophone is in E♭, like an alto, and sounds an octave and a major sixth below the page. That means the reading is identical to an alto player’s: written G is concert B♭. It just arrives at B♭2, 116.54 Hz — a full octave beneath where an alto puts it.
So if you have come from alto, the transposition is one you already know and nothing about reading changes. What changes is everything to do with length: how long a note takes to speak, how far the horn drifts on temperature, and how much of the bottom register a microphone can actually hear.
Concert pitch in the tone, the written note that produces it in the label. The low notes are genuinely low — headphones help.
Length changes what a tuner can tell you
The mechanical adjustment is the same one every saxophone has — the mouthpiece on the neck cork — and on a baritone it is the least twitchy version of it in the family. A millimetre here is a small fraction of a long tube, so the setting is stable and forgiving.
The two things that are genuinely harder are both about the bottom of the horn. A long air column takes time to settle into a stable fundamental, so a reading taken too early is a reading of a note that is still forming. And the lowest notes sit near the floor of what consumer microphones reproduce: concert C2 is 65.41 Hz, and a laptop microphone with a high-pass filter in it may pass you the second harmonic instead of the note.
The routine
- Warm it properly — longer than you think. A baritone holds a lot of cold air and takes several minutes of real playing to come up to a stable pitch. Tuning a cold bari means tuning it twice.
- Play written G, mezzo-forte, and hold it. Two seconds before you read anything. Watch for concert B♭.
- Sharp: pull the mouthpiece off. Flat: push it on. A millimetre at a time — it goes further here than the horn’s size suggests.
- Check the octave with written G low and high. The bari’s octaves are more forgiving than a soprano’s, but a badly-placed mouthpiece still shows up here first.
- Check your lowest notes last, and separately. Written B♭3 and low A if you have it. These often need their own embouchure adjustment rather than a mechanical one, and they are the notes most likely to be flat in performance.
Make the dial read your written note instead
Everything above names the concert pitch actually in the air, which is what a tuner is for and what the rest of the ensemble hears. But it is not what is printed on your part: a E♭ baritone saxophone sounds an octave and a major sixth lower than it reads, so written C comes out as concert E♭ an octave and a sixth down.
This tuner can close that gap for you. The Transposition setting adds the interval back before the note is named, so the dial reports the note you are reading rather than the note you are sounding — the one thing a guitar tuner has no reason to do, and the reason to keep this page rather than the first tuner in the results.
Open this tuner set to E♭ → — or reach it yourself from the gear icon on the dial, under Transposition. The choice is remembered on this device and it travels in the link, so a section leader can send that URL to a stand full of baritone saxophones and everyone arrives set the same way.
Switch it back to C — Concert pitch whenever you need to check yourself against the room, tune to a piano, or find out what a written note is actually sounding.
The other three horns
| Horn | Key | Written C sounds | Concert B♭ is written |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baritone (this page) | E♭ | an octave + major 6th lower | G |
| Alto | E♭ | a major 6th lower | G |
| Tenor | B♭ | a major 9th lower | C |
| Soprano | B♭ | a major 2nd lower | C |
The alto is the free double: identical written notes, an octave apart. All four are compared on the saxophone family page. If you are also reading bass clef parts on this horn, the bass clarinet and contrabassoon pages cover the same low-register reading problems from the double-reed side.