Bouzouki Tuner — Greek Trichordo, Tetrachordo & Irish GDAD

Three instruments answer to this name, and they share exactly one course. Count yours first — three courses or four, and whether the lowest one has two strings an octave apart — then tune the tuning that actually belongs to it.

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.

Three instruments, one name

“Bouzouki” is not a tuning. It is a name shared by three instruments that have exactly one course in common, and picking the wrong chart is by far the most common way a bouzouki ends up sounding wrong:

Greek trichordo — three courses, six strings, tuned D3D4–A3A3–D4D4. The rebetiko instrument.
Greek tetrachordo — four courses, eight strings, tuned C3C4–F3F4–A3A3–D4D4. What a new Greek bouzouki almost always is.
Irish bouzouki — four courses, eight strings, tuned G2–D3–A3–D4, every course a unison.

The single course all three share is the 1st: D4, two strings in unison. Everything below it moves.

Identify yours in two looks

You do not need to know the history to tune the thing. You need two facts about the instrument in front of you, and both are visible without a tuner.

Count the courses, not the strings. A course is a group that shares one fret and gets played as one note. Three courses (six strings) settles it immediately: you have a trichordo, tuned D–A–D.
If there are four, look at the back. A Greek bouzouki has a deeply rounded bowl built from glued staves and a scale around 26–27 inches. An Irish bouzouki has a flat or gently arched back, built like a guitar or a flat-back mandolin, usually 24–26 inches.
Still unsure? Pluck the lowest course one string at a time. Two different notes an octave apart means Greek. Two of the same note means Irish — or a Greek instrument someone has re-strung, which the next section covers.

Try itBouzouki reference tones, by type

3rd course · Ρε (the bass)D3 + D4 · octave pair
The one octave course on a trichordo. Its thin string doubles the 1st course exactly.
2nd course · ΛαA3 + A3 · unison
An octave below concert A — the easiest reading on the instrument.
1st course · Ρε (the melody)D4 + D4 · unison
An octave above the bass D. Check that interval before you finish.

The rebetiko instrument: ρε-λα-ρε, four pitches across six strings. Greek Wikipedia and the Greek Ministry of Culture’s Intangible Cultural Heritage inventory both give this tuning; the tzouras, a smaller relative, is tuned the same way.

Full Greek bouzouki guide →

Each course is a pair of strings. Where a course can be strung either way, the Unison/Octave toggle changes what you are tuning to — set it to match the strings actually on your instrument, not to what a chart says it should be.

Courses, not strings — and why the toggle matters

Every bouzouki is a coursed instrument: the strings run in pairs, both halves of a pair are fretted and struck together, and the pair sounds as one note. So the unit you tune is the course, and a course can be strung in one of two ways.

A unison course is two strings at the same pitch. An octave course is a thick wound string with a thin plain one tuned an octave above it, and it sounds brighter and larger than either string alone. On a bouzouki the lower-pitched string of an octave pair is conventionally the one nearer your thumb.

Which courses are which is not a matter of taste on the Greek instrument:

Trichordo: the bass D course is an octave pair. The A and the top D are unisons.
Tetrachordo: the C and F courses are octave pairs; the A and D are unisons. Unison F sets exist and are played, which is what the toggle on that course is for.
Irish: all four courses are unisons as standard. Octave stringing on the G course — and occasionally the D — is a widespread modification rather than a fault.

The tuning routine, whichever type you have

Damp one string of the course you are on. A fingertip on its partner is enough. Two strings sounding together give a detector something to average — and on an octave course, two genuinely different pitches to choose between, which is how you end up chasing a reading that matches neither string.
Start at the A course if you have one, since it is an octave below concert A and the cleanest reading on any of these instruments. On a trichordo that is the 2nd course; on both four-course instruments it is also the 2nd.
Do the two D courses consecutively and check the octave between them while it is fresh. Every one of these three instruments has two Ds an octave apart, and that is the pair that goes wrong.
Then the bass courses, one string at a time, reading the octave digit on each. This is where an octave course can quietly be a semitone-perfect octave out.
Finish every course by ear.A unison must stop beating; an octave pair must lock into one voice rather than two. The needle’s tolerance is wider than your ear’s, so the last few cents are not a reading.
Go round twice. Six or eight strings at tension move a lightly built top as you work, and the first course drifts while you set the last.

Where to go next

Once you know what you have, the dedicated page carries the rest — the physical mechanism, the failure modes, and the alternate tunings that instrument actually uses.

Greek bouzouki tuner — tetrachordo C–F–A–D and trichordo D–A–D, the octave courses, and what changed in the 1950s.
Irish bouzouki tuner — GDAD, the GDAE alternative, and where the instrument came from.

Neighbouring coursed instruments are worth a look if the pair-matching is the part you find hard: the mandolin is four unison courses in fifths, and the oud is the fretless end of the same lute family. Our guide to cents explains why two strings can both read centred and still beat.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know which bouzouki I have?

Count the courses — the groups of strings, not the strings. Three courses (six strings) is a Greek trichordo, tuned D–A–D. Four courses (eight strings) is either a Greek tetrachordo, tuned C–F–A–D, or an Irish bouzouki, tuned G–D–A–D. To separate those two, look at the back and the scale: a Greek instrument has a deeply rounded staved bowl and a scale around 26 to 27 inches, while an Irish one has a flat or gently arched back like a guitar. If it is still ambiguous, pluck the two strings of the lowest course separately — on a Greek instrument they will be an octave apart, and on a standard Irish one they will be the same note.

What is the difference between trichordo and tetrachordo?

A course, and about thirty years. The trichordo is the older instrument: three courses tuned D3D4–A3A3–D4D4, and the sound of classic rebetiko. The tetrachordo added a fourth course and shifted the tuning to C3C4–F3F4–A3A3–D4D4, which widened the range and made the chord shapes of Western-influenced Greek popular music far easier to reach; it is credited to Manolis Chiotis and dates from the 1950s. Greek sources give them as ρε-λα-ρε and ρε-λα-φα-ντο, the second written from the first course down. Both are still played, so neither is the tuning — but the tetrachordo is what a new instrument almost always is.

Why do some courses have two different notes?

Because they are octave pairs rather than unisons. On a Greek bouzouki the bass courses are strung with a thick wound string and a thin plain one tuned an octave above it, so the course sounds as one voice with a bright upper edge — that ring is most of what people mean by the bouzouki sound. The upper courses are plain unisons, two strings at the same pitch. It matters for tuning because an octave course lets you make a mistake that a unison cannot: both strings can read centred on the same letter while one of them is in the wrong octave entirely.

Can I use a guitar tuner or a guitar chart for a bouzouki?

A chromatic tuner is fine — that is all this page is. A guitar chart is not. The Greek tetrachordo C–F–A–D is one whole step below the top four strings of a guitar, which is close enough to be misleading, and the Irish GDAD shares no more than its outer notes with anything on a guitar. Use a chromatic reading and watch the octave digit, which is the number that actually protects you on a coursed instrument. Turn any guitar preset off: a preset snaps whatever it hears to the nearest note in its own list, so it will show you the note it expected rather than the note you played.

Is an Irish bouzouki a kind of Greek bouzouki?

It started as one. In the mid-1960s Johnny Moynihan retuned a Greek tetrachordo from C3–F3–A3–D4 to G2–D3–A3–D4 for Irish traditional music, keeping the top two courses exactly where they were. The tuning caught on, builders started making instruments for it, and the two have diverged since — flatter backs, longer scales, and all-unison courses rather than octave pairs. Today they are relatives rather than the same instrument, which is why they get separate pages here.