Bass Clarinet Tuner — Free Online B♭ Bass Clarinet Tuner

A bass clarinet reads and fingers exactly like the B♭ soprano you probably started on, and sounds one octave further down. That octave is the whole confusion: written C comes out as concert B♭3, so the dial agrees with your part on the letter and sits an octave below it on the number.

Tap “Start Tuning” and allow microphone access — audio is analyzed on your device and never leaves it. No microphone? You can still play reference tones for every note.

A soprano clarinet, one octave down

A bass clarinet reads, fingers and breaks exactly like the B♭ soprano clarinet most players arrive from — and sounds an octave further below it. Written C comes out as concert B♭3, 233.08 Hz, which is a major ninth below the page.

That ninth is the whole confusion, and it is worth stating plainly because it looks like a broken tuner: the dial will agree with your part on the letter once you set the transposition, and it will still show an octave number one lower. Nothing is wrong. A bass clarinet genuinely is a low instrument written in a high clef, and the octave is the price of the fingerings staying the same.

Try itBass clarinet — written note to concert pitch

Concert pitch in the tone, the written note that produces it in the label. Headphones help with the bottom two rows.

The neck is the barrel

There is no barrel on a bass clarinet. The tuning adjustment is the neck — the curved metal tube between the mouthpiece and the upper joint — which slides in and out of the body exactly as a barrel does. Out is flat, in is sharp. Many instruments have a proper tuning slide built into the neck for the same job.

Everything below the neck is structure, not adjustment. The joints between the upper body, the lower body and the bell look like places you could pull, and pulling them opens a leak rather than lowering the pitch. If the instrument will not come down to pitch at the neck, the answer is a longer neck or a different mouthpiece, not a gap somewhere else.

The routine

Warm the instrument through. There is a lot of air column here and it is cold when you start. Several minutes of playing, not warm breath blown down the bore.
Play the long C — written C5, over the break — mezzo-forte. Watch for concert B♭ on the dial. Hold it for two full seconds before reading anything.
Sharp: pull the neck out. Flat: push it in. A millimetre at a time, re-attacking the note after each move.
Check the twelfth, not the octave. A clarinet overblows at the twelfth, so the meaningful interval check here is written E3 against written B4 — not two Cs an octave apart. If the upper note is sharp against the lower, the mouthpiece or the neck length is wrong rather than the position.
Check the low register last. Written E3 and below, one note at a time, each held until the reading settles. These are the notes that will be flat in performance if anything is going to be.

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 B♭ bass clarinet sounds a major ninth lower than it reads, so written C comes out as concert B♭ an octave and a tone 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 B♭ → — 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 bass clarinets 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 rest of the family

Every clarinet shares the fingering system and disagrees about the pitch it produces:

Clarinet	Sounds	Written C5 sounds
E♭ sopranino	a minor 3rd higher	E♭5 · 622.25 Hz
B♭ soprano	a major 2nd lower	B♭4 · 466.16 Hz
A	a minor 3rd lower	A4 · 440.00 Hz
E♭ alto	a major 6th lower	E♭4 · 311.13 Hz
B♭ bass (this page)	a major 9th lower	B♭3 · 233.08 Hz

If you also play baritone sax, the low-register reading problems on that page are the same ones in a different key.

Frequently asked questions

Is a bass clarinet fingered the same as a B♭ soprano clarinet?

Yes — the fingering system and the written range are the same, which is why soprano players can pick one up and read immediately. What changes is the pitch: it sounds one octave lower than a soprano, so written C is concert B♭3 rather than B♭4. It also has a neck and a peg or strap instead of a barrel, and the low keys below written E are extra mechanism a soprano does not have.

Why does the tuner name the right letter but the wrong octave?

A bass clarinet sounds a major ninth below what it reads — an octave and a whole tone. The Transposition setting adds the whole tone back, which puts the letter right, but the octave digit stays one below your part. That is the setting working correctly rather than a fault: the letter is what you read from, and the octave is just the tuner being honest about how low the note actually is.

Where do I tune a bass clarinet — there is no barrel?

At the neck. The neck slides into the upper joint and pulling it out flattens the instrument, exactly as pulling a barrel does on a soprano. Some instruments also have a tuning slide built into the neck itself. Treat it as the coarse control and everything below it as fixed; the joints between body sections are not tuning adjustments and pulling them opens leaks.

My low notes are flat and will not come up. What should I check?

A pad leak, before anything else. The extended low keys are long, lightly sprung and the most common place on the instrument for a pad to stop seating, and the symptom is exactly this — the bottom of the range goes flat and unresponsive while the upper register reads fine. Push the neck in and the low notes will still be flat, because pitch is not the actual problem. Check the pads before you touch the tuning.

Does the low C extension change how I tune?

Not the setup, but it changes what you can check. An instrument extended to low C reaches concert B♭1 at 58.27 Hz, which is low enough that a phone microphone may struggle and low enough that the note needs a moment to establish before a reading means anything. Use the octave display to be sure the tuner has found the fundamental rather than a harmonic above it.