Tenor Sax Tuner — Free Online B♭ Tenor Saxophone Tuner

A tenor saxophone is in B♭ and sounds a major ninth below the page — an octave and a whole tone. Play your written C and the room hears concert B♭. This dial names the pitch in the air, and will name the written note instead if you ask it to.

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.

An octave and a tone below the page

A tenor saxophone is in B♭, and it sounds a major ninth below what you read — an octave plus a whole tone. Play a written C and the room hears concert B♭3, at 233.08 Hz.

That is a bigger gap than most transpositions and it produces a specific confusion worth naming up front: the letter the dial shows is a whole tone off your part, and the octave number beside it is one lower again. Nothing is wrong. A tenor genuinely is a low instrument reading in a high clef.

Try itTenor saxophone — written note to concert pitch

Every tone here is the concert pitch, with the written note that produces it in the label. Tap the highlighted row before you play it.

The cork, and why the tenor is slower than the alto

Like every saxophone, a tenor has one mechanical adjustment: the mouthpiece on the neck cork. On this horn it is a gentler control than on an alto, because there is more air column behind it — the same millimetre buys you fewer cents. That is genuinely easier to set and it makes one thing harder: a tenor drifts a long way on temperature before the cork position ever looks wrong, so almost every mid-rehearsal pitch problem on a tenor is heat, not setup.

The routine

Warm the horn through. Five minutes of playing, not thirty seconds of blowing warm air through it. A cold tenor can be twenty cents flat and it will come up on its own.
Play written C, mezzo-forte. Full air, relaxed jaw, at the dynamic you actually play at. Watch for concert B♭ on the dial.
Sharp: pull the mouthpiece off. Flat: push it on. A millimetre at a time, and re-attack the note after each move rather than sustaining through it.
Check the octave. Low written C, then written C an octave up. If the top one is sharp, the mouthpiece is too far on. This is the check that distinguishes a horn that is in tune from one that merely reads correctly on a single note.
Check written C♯ and the palm keys. Expect them sharp. Knowing by how much on your horn is the point of doing this with a tuner rather than by ear.

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♭ tenor saxophone 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 tenor 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.

Tenor and soprano read the same, alto and baritone read the same

If you double, this is the pairing to keep in your head rather than four separate intervals:

Horn	Key	Written C sounds	Concert B♭ is written
Tenor (this page)	B♭	a major 9th lower	C
Soprano	B♭	a major 2nd lower	C
Alto	E♭	a major 6th lower	G
Baritone	E♭	an octave + major 6th lower	G

A tenor and a soprano play the identical written note for concert B♭ and land an octave apart, which is why a doubler switching between them changes almost nothing mentally and a doubler switching to alto changes everything. The saxophone family page lays out all four together.

Frequently asked questions

What note do I play when the band tunes to concert B♭?

Written C, third space in the treble clef — the same written note a soprano sax, a trumpet and a B♭ clarinet play for the same call. On a tenor it comes out as concert B♭3 at 233.08 Hz, an octave and a whole tone below the page.

Why does the dial show the right letter but the wrong octave?

Because a tenor sounds a major ninth below what it reads — an octave plus a major second. The Transposition setting adds the major second back, which fixes the letter, but it moves the note name rather than the octave number, so the digit beside it stays one lower than your part. The letter is the part you read from; the octave is worth knowing about so it does not look like a fault.

Is the tenor easier or harder to tune than an alto?

Easier to hold, slower to adjust. There is more tube behind the mouthpiece, so a millimetre of cork moves the pitch less than it does on an alto and the setting is less twitchy. What the extra length costs you is response time: low notes need a moment of steady air before the reading settles, so a needle that is still wandering has usually just not heard enough of the note yet.

Which notes on a tenor are reliably out of tune?

Written C♯ at the top of the staff is sharp on essentially every saxophone — the tube is almost entirely open beneath it, so there is very little instrument left to control the pitch. Written D just above it and the palm-key notes above that also tend sharp. These are design compromises rather than faults; the fix is voicing and, for the palm keys, dropping the jaw rather than adjusting anything mechanical.

Can I use the same mouthpiece position I use on my alto?

No — the two horns are different lengths and the cork positions are not comparable, even with mouthpieces from the same maker. Set each one against its own tuning note. If you double regularly, it is worth marking the cork on both once you have found the positions, because the practical failure mode is not getting it wrong but re-deriving it under time pressure before a rehearsal.